For some years now, the need to build a new Directional Centre, to concentrate the administrative offices of the Sicilian Region in one place, has become urgent.
Mission: international competition
architectural design: Botticini + Facchinelli ARW (architet Camillo Botticini, architet Matteo Facchinelli)
Collaborators: RPA, RGM, Manens-Tifs, PROGER
Render: FLOOER studio
Location: Palermo, Italy
area: 36.000mq
client: Sicily Region
80,000 mq office
23.000 mq parkings + 10.000mq interchange parking
23.000 mq public space/green space
Auditorium 1.500 seats
Library/heritage centre, Schools
Catholic church
schedule: 2020
Studio ARW’s methodological approach started from an analysis of the context, in order to understand how to transform it through a proposal that considers that this part of the city combines coherent urban fragments with others that are not related to each other and to infrastructures.
In this peripheral context, the extraordinary landscape frame of the northern part of Palermo still emerges: between the cultivated areas, the green parks and the reliefs of Mount Ercla and Capo Gallo, two windows open onto the Mediterranean at Mondello beach and the Sferrocavallo area.
From this double scale of relations, the condition of peripherality is reversed into centrality through the construction of an “osmotic enclosure”, that is, a spiral layout defining a space with a clear identity connotation with a new square at the centre conceived as a shared space serving the offices. The architecture is conceived as a sort of contemporary Palazzo dei Normanni, thanks to which the connotations of peripherality are also overturned by the general enhancement of the surrounding open spaces. Thanks to this, in addition to the local scale, the project operates at the scale of the overall landscape, through the 42-storey tower that caresses the horizon.
