New BNL-BNP Paribas Real Estate Group headquarter

A public building for Rome: heaven, generosity, the myth of progress. Each architecture is public. Whatever its client and its function. This must be even more important for a bank, like BNL, with its history and its present.
What is a Public Building? It is a building that “represents” and “means” a society, a time, a will to belong to the place, to the genealogy, and thus to the different times, the past, present and future and contemporaneity, with its mysteries, its invisibility and its “darkness”.
Expressing all these wills and realities, the soul of a place and a society, must bring with it a great act of generosity, that is to make available the ability to interpret and represent these things to the community.
Like the Greek Theater through the mimesis, it created the connection between the individual and the community, creating the citizen, so Architecture gives pleasure, reality, beauty, in the specificity of a cultural and spatial condition.
With the same purpose of “creating the citizen”.
This place in Rome is a “lucky” place for those who have to design: open, with a sudden loss of density linked to the railway infrastructure, there are no archeological or historic graves, apart from the Mazzoni railway tank (“lucky accident “, which forced and allowed the building to break and deform).
And then it is a place of “great heaven”.
Open, large, bright, bright.
Myths are a sharing tool because they belong to everyone.
The sky of Rome is a myth.
But also the railway is a myth, of progress.
A futuristic myth. Dynamic, fast, changing.
Then the public building, the BNL / BNP Paribas New Headquarters, is outlined as an act of generosity that deals with two myths: the sky of Rome and the futuristic and dynamic force of “progress.”
It is mirror to give to all the multiplication of the sky of Rome, it is deformed, like an horizontal Brancusi, or as a painting by Boccioni, to multiply and make that same sky dynamic.
Rome is all about it. It is its Heaven and its Geneaology.
Architecture is of everyone and acts to “create citizens”.

location
Roma, Italy

client
BNP Paribas Real Estate Development spa

architectural, urbanistic, and landscape design
Gianluca Peluffo
with 5+1AA

design team
Alessandro Bellus, (project leader), Francesca Raffaella Pirrello (project leader), Marco Corazza ,Gabriele Filippi, Marzia Menini, Sara Sartini, Maria Michela Scala, Daniele di Matteo, Sara Massa, Vanesa Carbajo Fernandez, Roberta Nardi, Francesca Zampetti, Lorenza Barabino.

plan
New BNL-BPN Paribas Real Estate Group headquarter

total area
85.000 m2

cost
83M eur

calendar
2016

photo
© Luc Boegly
© Antonia Marmo
© Ernesta Caviola – extract from the movie “Il cielo di Roma”

video
a film by The Piranesi Experience
directed by Ernesta Caviola
with: Francesco Loschiavo
producer: Claudio Esposito
soundtrack: Populous
editor: Alessio Franco
dop: Fabio Paolucci
2^ND unit dop: Emanuele Pasquet
color correction: Patroclo Film
drone operator: Francesco Siciliano, Francesco Garritano
thanks to  Luigi Adami