Top management for Italian bank
Intesa Sanpaolo held a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Friday to
inaugurate the company's new operational headquarters, a
166-metre skyscraper designed by famed architect Renzo Piano.
The structure required an investment of a half-billion
euros and took five years to build, and will now be a workplace
for 2,000 of the employees of the bank, Italy's second biggest
after Unicredit.
The building is just a couple metres shy of the city's
best-known and tallest landmark, the 168-metre Mole
Antonelliana, completed in 1889 and designed originally to be a
synagogue.
On the ground floor, the tower has a multi-purpose 364-seat
"suspended" auditorium, so named because it is hung from the
transfer trusses four stories above ground level and thus has no
vertical sustaining structures to block views of the city.
The roof hosts a bioclimatic greenhouse and restaurant open
to the public, as well as a panoramic terrace.
Five hundred workers and technicians participated in the
construction project, managed by Italian contractors Rizzani de
Eccher.
According to Intesa Sanpaolo's website, the new landmark
"is both an environmental and social laboratory and an urban
project, with a discreet urbanity that unites it with the city's
inhabitants".
The building is located on the edge of the historic town
center, near Porta Susa Station, at the northeast intersection
of Corso Inghilterra with Corso Vittorio Emanuele II.
It is set "at the center of an exceptional concentration of
public services and facilities on the metropolitan scale in a
zone of strategic importance for the city", the bank said.
The adjoining garden, Giardino Nicola Grosa, has been
upgraded and transformed into a "playful" space, it said, with
trees of different heights, lawns and neighborhood functions.
Access to the garden from Corso Inghilterra is provided by
a public gallery that traverses the entrance hall on the ground
floor.
Renzo Piano is perhaps Italy's most famous public
architect, or 'starchitect'.
The Genoese-born architect, 77, has worked on the
designs of many of the planet's modern landmarks, including
London's Shard skyscraper, the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the
Potzdammer Platz masterplan in Berlin, the Kansai airport in
Japan, the Nemo Science Museum in Amsterdam, and the New York
Times building in Manhattan.
In addition to winning architecture's coveted Pritzker
Prize, Piano has received the Kyoto Prize, Amsterdam's Erasmus
award, the RIBA Gold Medal, the Sonning Prize, and the AIA Gold
Medal, among other honours.
He has been UNESCO's goodwill ambassador for cities since
1994.
In 2004 he founded the Renzo Piano Foundation, a non-profit
organization for supporting young architects based in Genoa.
He was named a life Senator in 2013.
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