Banca Patrimoni Sella Headquarters

For the Sella group AMDL CIRCLE has realised an urban regeneration and building project involving three buildings and the opening of a square for public use. The main user of the spaces is Banca Patrimoni Sella & C., who have chosen it as their headquarters in Biella. Starting with the creation of the banking offices, the project has generated an interconnection of spaces for work, socialising and training. The project combines the restoration of the historic Palazzone [literally Big Building] – the site of the new offices – with the renovation of the cafeteria-restaurant and the new construction of a flexible architecture, inspired by glass greenhouses. All this provides the frame for the opening of a new plaza with a part designed as a garden. Having become the fulcrum driving the area during the course of the work, the plaza is the space that showcases the urban pole, a place to benefit from moments of individual and social activity in the open air.
The project focuses on three principles: the repurposing of the existing elements, the highlighting of the spaces for public use, the flexibility of the new constructions. Everything is combined thanks to wood, the protagonist of the project, which with its natural character generates an immediate sense that it welcomes those who use it.

Historically one of the first headquarters of “Banca Sella” – which subsequently moved to the offices in Via Italia in Biella – the building known as the Palazzone is a simple and neat yet imposing volume. It is located in Via Arnulfo, a short distance from Piazza Duomo and from the Cathedral of Santo Stefano, in an area that for a long time has been unused and inaccessible to the city. The building is structured into four levels above ground and one below, making a total of 6,000 m², restored respecting the distributive and architectural characteristics of the original plan. The repurposed internal spaces have been adapted with new installations to meet the demands of a contemporary office, renovated with wooden flooring and doors and windows. The first two floors host the consultancy offices of Banca Patrimoni Sella & C., where the atmosphere is dictated by the oak wood of the furnishing system designed by AMDL CIRCLE and used in all the branches of the Sella group. The offices are distributed on either side of the two central corridors (one per floor) around 70 metres long. The perspective of the corridors is emphasised by woodwork and continuous cupboards that fully cover the walls. Concealed in the cupboards are the archive materials, methodically conserved, while a series of niches for the display of objects structures the rhythm of the woodwork. Climbing up to the second floor, the restored spaces are occupied by the group’s holding, while the guesthouse for employees is located on the third floor. The floor below ground is used for storage.
Externally, the shutters and the original wooden front doors have been dismantled, restored and made good. On the ground floor, on the side facing onto Via Seminari, a public pedestrian passageway has been opened that connects the road to the courtyard owned by the bank, now transformed into a piazza with a garden: the view between the two thresholds invites citizens to enter and experience the green outdoor space.

Having demolished the old surrounding wall that closed off the area along Via Arnulfo, the intervention creates a space open to dialogue with the neighbourhood and the city. It is a piazza with a garden for public use: an element of visual and functional connection between the three buildings, from which access is gained to all the spaces that are the object of the intervention. The piazza is a space for socialisation, which the bank was very keen on in order to create opportunities for meeting outside the office and offering its open spaces for the wellbeing of the community. In the basement a car park has been created to serve the area. The external image is defined by the local stone flooring (the same as in the plinth of the Palazzone), by the green of the trees and shrubs and by the wooden furnishings outside the cafeteria-restaurant. The renovation of the cafeteria-restaurant overlooking the piazza, opposite Via Arnulfo, adds another social dimension to the site. It is in the volume adjacent to the Palazzone, already previously used for dining, which has been restored at an architectural level and had its functions restored.

On the left side of the piazza is the new flexible architecture designed by AMDL CIRCLE. The profile is inspired by the design of glass greenhouses, as a place devoted to the germination of ideas and the cultivation of knowledge. Some semi-abandoned buildings stood on the plot, and these were demolished in order to reconstruct a new box with the same volume. The interior, free from barriers, is an ideal space to host conferences and meetings for personnel training, but it has been conceived and organised with the aim of endowing the bank with an easily reprogrammable environment, capable of responding to ever different demands and future uses. The architecture consists entirely of prefabricated elements – created based on a design by AMDL CIRCLE – and is characterised by just three materials of natural origin: larch wood for the external structure, glass for the curtain walls and metal for the roof. In particular, wood is the standard-bearing element of the project and has a construction value but also an aesthetic and symbolic meaning. It has been chosen for the numerous advantages offered by a wooden structure, such as rapid realisation, stability, sustainability and energy saving, but above all for the material’s property of “naturalising” and continuing to change with time, increasing its charm. Glass is the emblem of transparency, giving the building lightness and creating a circular continuity between interior and exterior: the perception of the greenery of the garden flows inside the greenhouse, which in turn projects the material qualities of wood outside; in the same way, the informal social organisation of the piazza is very visible from inside the architecture, while the indoor activities are recognisable from the piazza. The line of the metal roof harmoniously follows the shape of the buildings bordering the bank’s property. The floor of the greenhouse is made of 150×2 metres grès tiles, which conceal the entire wiring layout that is necessary for the technological systems provided.