Sicily Region Business Centre

For several years now, the need to build a new Management Centre, to concentrate the administrative offices of the Sicilian Region in a single location, has become urgent. 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 joins coherent urban fragments with others that are not related to each other and to infrastructures. In this part of the outskirts, the extraordinary landscape frame of the northern part of Palermo still emerges: between the cultivated areas, the green parks and the hills of Mount Ercla and Capo Gallo, two windows open onto the Mediterranean at Mondello beach and the Sferrocavallo area.

This double scale of relations reverses the condition of peripherality into centrality through the construction of an “osmotic enclosure”, a spiral layout defining a space with a clear identity, with a new square at the centre designed as a shared space serving the offices. The architecture is designed as a sort of contemporary Palazzo dei Normanni, thanks to which the connotations of peripherality are overturned, also for the general enhancement of the surrounding open spaces. Thanks to this, in addition to the local scale, the project operates on the scale of the overall landscape, through the 42-storey tower that hugs the horizon.