Il Lingotto: the transforming power of architecture From the symbol of the industrial avant-garde to the commercial and cultural beating heart of a neighborhood

Giovanni Agnelli (the grandfather of the most famous "l’avvocato") dreams for Fiat a large and modern factory, inspired by the assembly lines of Ford. He obtained it at the beginning of the 1920s with the Lingotto plant, an imposing structure located in the district of Nizza Millefonti, closed between via Nizza (from number 230 to 294) and a branch of the Turin railway loop. The building, designed by the architect Giacomo Mattè Trucco and inaugurated in 1923 in the presence of King Vittorio Emanuele III, shows for the first time how it is possible to combine the models coming from North American capitalism with the needs and trends of contemporary architecture. Its numbers are enormous: a volume of one million cubic meters, a length of 500 meters, a width of 80 meters, 5 floors of height.