GAM Torino is a proposed renovation of Turin’s Civic Gallery of Modern and Contemporary Art by MVRDV with Balance Architettura, reworking the 1959 building by Carlo Bassi and Goffredo Boschetti through reopened skylights, cleared gallery floors, a public diagonal passage, and an open-storage basement that makes the museum collection more visible within the life of the city.
GAM Torino Technical Information
- ArchitectsMVRDV, Balance Architettura
- LocationTurin, Italy
- Gross Area18,140 m2 | 195,257 Sq. Ft.
- Project Years2025 – Ongoing
- Visualisations© MVRDV
We aim to clean up and to open this now-enclosed building as much as possible. It creates a dialogue between the past and the future.
– Winy Maas, MVRDV
Reworking the 1959 Modernist Framework
The existing GAM Torino building occupies an unusual position within Turin’s dense urban fabric. Completed in 1959 by Carlo Bassi and Goffredo Boschetti, its main volume was placed diagonally inside an otherwise orthogonal block, a decision that separated the museum from the dominant street grid and allowed more even daylight exposure across the galleries. This oblique siting gave the institution a distinct civic presence without relying on monumental height or historical quotation.
MVRDV and Balance Architettura approach the renovation as a process of removal as much as addition. Later interventions, including closed skylights, fenced gardens, external fire escape stairs, and accumulations of internal partitions, are treated as reversible layers that obscured the original spatial logic. The proposal restores the legibility of the free plan by clearing the galleries and relocating emergency circulation within the building, where a new stair mirrors the position of the original stair in plan.
This strategy frames conservation as selective editing rather than stylistic reconstruction. The project does not attempt to freeze the museum in its postwar condition, but it identifies openness, daylight, and structural clarity as the building’s most durable architectural values. The critical test will lie in how contemporary codes, climate control, security, and curatorial needs can be integrated without producing a new set of permanent obstructions.
The Museum as an Urban Passage
The most consequential urban operation is the creation of a diagonal public route through the site, passing beneath the main gallery volume. This cut aligns the museum with pedestrian movement between central Turin, the Polytechnic University area, and nearby cultural infrastructure. Rather than treating the gallery as a self-contained destination, the proposal positions it as part of a daily route through the city.
At ground level, circulation becomes civic space. The plaza is conceived as a broad paved surface with glass elements set into the floor, allowing views and light to connect with the open-storage level below. In the night visualizations, the illuminated basement gives the square a legible underside, while during the day, the transparency of the ground floor reduces the separation between museum interior, sculpture garden, and street.
This porosity also introduces operational complexity. A public passage through museum grounds must negotiate opening hours, crowd control, fire strategy, ticketed and unticketed zones, and the protection of artworks below and around the route. The architectural proposition is strongest when understood not as a simple gesture of openness, but as an attempt to make access, display, and urban movement overlap within a controlled institutional framework.
Open Storage as Public Space
The basement is reconfigured as publicly accessible storage, shifting part of the museum’s collection from back-of-house reserve to visible cultural infrastructure. Renderings show dense arrays of paintings on perforated screens, sculpture fields arranged on pale terrazzo plinths, and storage systems exposed within a long top-lit hall. The proposal challenges the familiar hierarchy in which selected works appear in calm galleries while the larger collection remains hidden.
Architecturally, the open-storage level depends on a different spatial rhythm from the conventional white-box gallery. Density replaces isolation, and the visitor encounters groupings, typologies, and material families rather than singular works suspended in curatorial silence. This can deepen public understanding of how collections are assembled, conserved, catalogued, and interpreted, especially when storage is treated as a working environment rather than a theatrical backdrop.
The risk of this model is visual saturation. Without clear interpretive structure, dense storage can reduce artworks to accumulated inventory, where abundance becomes a substitute for reading. The success of the basement will depend on the calibration of display screens, lighting, routes, labels, conservation thresholds, and moments of pause, allowing visitors to understand both individual works and the institutional systems that hold them.
Adaptable Galleries and Environmental Renewal
Reopening the skylights restores zenithal daylight as one of the defining spatial instruments of the 1959 building. The proposed galleries are shown beneath deep coffered roof structures that diffuse light across terrazzo floors, white columns, and flexible exhibition zones. For a museum of modern and contemporary art, this return to daylight must be carefully moderated, balancing the architectural value of natural illumination with conservation requirements for sensitive works.
The new display system introduces a railing grid suspended between the structural columns. From this overhead framework, walls, curtains, platforms, and other exhibition elements can be rearranged without permanently dividing the plan. In the visualisations, sculptures appear on suspended timber platforms and temporary partitions sit lightly within the structural field, suggesting a curatorial environment that can change while preserving the continuity of the gallery volume.
The environmental strategy is tied to this architectural restraint. Existing furniture is restored or brought back from storage, demolished materials are proposed for reuse in new elements, and the performance of glass skylights is improved. These measures are modest in expression but significant in principle, shifting the renovation away from replacement and toward a more circular treatment of building fabric, interior fittings, and embodied resources.
About MVRDV
MVRDV was set up in 1993 by Winy Maas, Jacob van Rijs and Nathalie de Vries. Based in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, the studio works globally on solutions to contemporary architectural and urban issues through an approach that combines architecture, urbanism, research, and public engagement.
Credits and Additional Notes
- Structural engineers: EP&S Group
- MEP consultants: EP&S Group
- Client: Fondazione Torino Musei, Fondazione Compagnia di San Paolo
- Other contributors: Balance Architettura, co-architect; EP&S Group, cost calculation and environmental advisor; Busato, energy consultant; Di Gioia Michelangelo, geologist; Stratospherica, public space experts; Antonio Luca Coco, Luana La Martina, Angelo La Delfa, Lorenzo D’Alessando, Stefano Fiaschi, visualisations; Maria Stamati, strategy and development
