Transforming without erasing is probably the hardest exercise for anyone working at the intersection of innovation and the workplace. I often find myself measuring a project’s maturity by its ability to hold historical memory and contemporary corporate culture together, without reducing one to a mere backdrop for the other. When a building constructed for entirely different functions is reread as a space for research, laboratories and encounter, the result says a great deal about how an organisation chooses to position itself in its own time.
In Turin, at the heart of the historic Cittadella, the former De Sonnaz barracks now house Reply House, the new headquarters of the Reply group across roughly 20,500 square metres. The urban regeneration project, designed by ACPV Architects Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel, preserved the original facades, courtyards and volumes of the nineteenth-century building, integrating them with new internal connections, green areas and an auditorium carved into the lower levels. In that same underground space, a section of the Cittadella’s Renaissance-era wall, linked to the memory of Pietro Micca, resurfaces — restored and made visible as an integral part of the visitor route rather than a decorative backdrop. The campus dedicates an entire wing to applied artificial-intelligence laboratories, where frontier technologies are translated into concrete solutions for the group’s clients. Artificial intelligence also shapes the interiors themselves, used alongside industrial partners to generate surfaces, fabrics and finishes. The project returns to the city an entire block that had been cut off from the urban fabric for decades, showing how the regeneration of a protected heritage asset can become an engine for research and corporate culture as much as for urban renewal.
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