Palazzo Cacherano di Bricherasio is a seventeenth-century building in the historic centre of Turin: for centuries the residence of the Counts of Bricherasio, then subjected - over the course of the twentieth century - to transformations, subdivisions and changes of ownership that had eroded its unity and its meaning. After roughly a decade of abandonment, in 1994 the building was reacquired in its entirety and given a new public life. The restoration and refurbishment carried out between 1993 and 1996 returned the palazzo to its civic and cultural vocation: not a museum-like freezing of the fabric, but a recovery that reactivated its spaces to host the life of the Foundation that would take its name. It is a Heritage project in the fullest sense - reading the layering of a historic building, recognising its protected status and its materials, and giving it back a contemporary use without betraying its memory. One of the earliest chapters of the path that would later take shape as Base Engineering.
The Project
Overview
The project concerns the requalification of a historic palazzo in the centre of Turin, intended for exhibitions and conferences through a complex process of regeneration. A noble palazzo intended from its origins as a residence - and later transformed by Don Orione into a first-reception home for the workers who arrived in Turin in the 1960s to work at FIAT - the building was functionally recovered in most of its spaces to host the exhibition areas of the Foundation and to welcome the public. To connect the floors, the main staircase was integrated with a new helical stair with a central lift. The spaces are organized over several levels: on the ground floor the reception, the info point and the open-air exhibition areas; the public spaces on the first and second floors; the Foundation on the upper floors and in the basement; on the attic floor, the owner's residence. The historic rooms fully preserve their Baroque and nineteenth-century decorative apparatus.
The Challenge
The main difficulty was convincing the new ownership to devote the building - which was initially to become an office centre - to a place of exhibitions and cultural entertainment: a choice that changed the destiny of the palazzo and its relationship with the city, opening it to the public rather than reserving it for a private function.
Pre-Development & Governance
The preliminary phase defined the programme of functional recovery: transforming most of the palazzo into exhibition areas for the Foundation and for welcoming the public, integrating the vertical connections with the new helical stair, and organizing the spaces over several levels. An approach that made it possible to hold together the building's new public vocation and the ownership's requirements.
Systems & Technical Coordination
From a technical standpoint, we assembled a team of professionals qualified in the field of restoration. The most delicate themes were the structures and, above all, the heating and cooling systems: all the technological runs were concentrated on brackets independent of the historic structures, or concealed in under-floor voids that allow greater flexibility in the design of the exhibition set-ups - so as not to affect the decorative apparatus.
Process Management
We directed the highly qualified team of professionals, in dialogue with all the figures involved - starting with the restorers - in order to hold together restoration, structures and systems in a single, coherent process.
Value Added
Like all historic palazzi, the building needed to find a new identity, different from its original residential one: to open itself to the city, to allow citizens to enjoy it and to recover its former splendour. The recovery restored to Turin a public place for culture - and to us the confirmation that the value of a historic asset is measured in the life it manages to host.
