Art in the fast lane: two new privately sponsored art centers mark the first stage of an ambitious program to reinvent Turin as an international culture capital - Report From Turin - Fondazione Agnelli and the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo

Perhaps not since the Italian Psychoanalytical Society last convened in Turin has the word sogno--dream--been uttered there with such fervor and frequency as it was in September when two private art foundations, the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo and the Fondazione Giovanni e Marella Agnelli, ceremonially opened new public exhibition spaces. An often raucous premier show of contemporary work called "Exit: New Geography of Italian Art" inaugurated the new headquarters of Patrizia Sandretto's seven-year-old foundation (Re Rebaudengo is her husband's surname). Designed with radical simplicity by Claudio Silvestrin and realized in collaboration with the engineer James Hardwick, the unadorned building is an example of what the Milanese-born, London-based Silvestrin terms l'architettura essenziale. The chaste but imposing exterior is revetted with a grid of limestone slabs and punctuated by broad wooden doors. Vertical cuts high in the windowless principal facade admit fingers of natural light.

Renzo Piano is the author of the Pinacoteca Agnelli, that foundation's gallery, which made its debut atop Lingotto, a onetime Fiat production facility and Italy's preeminent monument of modernist industrial architecture. The Genoese Piano and Giovanni (Gianni) Agnelli, grandson of the auto company's founder and its honorary president today, have shepherded the redevelopment of the plant since the mid-1980s. Its modular facade preserved, Lingotto has been resurrected as a multipurpose urban complex comprising business, retail, educational and entertainment components. With the Pinacoteca's public and administrative functions stacked on six levels, five of them preexisting (the ticket office and bookshop, for example, are integrated into the retail mall level), its signature architectural element is a boldly angular steel box capped by a projecting roof and perched atop one of the internal pavilions which subdivide the massive Lingotto complex. Set toward the western curve of Lingotto's legendary speedway-style test track, the eccentric addition faces the Bolla (Bubble), a transparent spherical conference center erected by Piano eight years ago at the ellipse's other end.

The pavilion's upper floor houses nearly 11,000 square feet of temporary exhibition space; the first presentation there is devoted to Lingotto's own history. Far greater excitement, however, attended the unveiling in the 4,800-square-foot penthouse gallery of 25 works donated by Gianni Agnelli and his wife, Marella, to the new foundation which bears their names. After some heated speculation about which works the couple might part with (some edgy paintings by Balthus or Bacon, possibly?), the gift proved to be a suite of bona fide masterpieces from the 18th to 20th centuries, with concentrations in the Venetian school (Giambattista Tiepolo, Canaletto, Bellotto, Canova), Paris-based modernism (Manet, Renoir, Matisse, Picasso, Modigliani) and Italian Futurism (Balla, Severini).

The careful choice of museum-quality art was intended to testify not simply to the Agnellis' generosity but to their impeccable connoisseurship as well. Currently, there are no plans for subsequent gifts to the foundation, nor any word of the next show slated for the temporary exhibition space. The Lingotto facility will be administered by the Fiat subsidiary which owns and manages the Venetian exhibition venue Palazzo Grassi.

The idea of a new art center as the fulfillment of a patron's personal dream was invoked at both inaugurations, though with an insistence at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo that lent the concept trademark status. Established by Patrizia Sandretto in 1995, the foundation launched its activities with a photography exhibition curated by Francesco Bonami (the foundation's chief curator and the organizer of "Exit") and presented at that year's Venice Biennale. Maintaining an association with the Venetian institution--most recently, in 2001, by sponsoring the erection of Maurizio Cattelan's Hollywood sign in Palermo--the foundation printed 50,000 copies of the book Sogni/Dreams for distribution during the preview days of the 1999 Biennale. Over 100 international visual artists had been asked to ruminate on the topic of--you guessed it--dreams, after being informed of Sandretto's own vision of inaugurating a Turin exhibition center "in the near future." The book was edited by Bonami and Hans Ulrich Obrist, one of five members (with Dan Cameron, Flaminio Gualdoni, Kasper Konig and Rosa Martinez) of the foundation's cultural and scientific committee. Shortly after the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo opening in September, Bonami, in his latest role as the visual arts director of the 2003 Venice Biennale, announced that the titular theme of the international show's next edition will be "Sogni e Conflitti"--Dreams and Conflicts.

Silvestrin's building for the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo includes some 11,000 square feet of exhibition space (distributed among a large hall, a video/project room and a long, narrow gallery), an education center, a 150-seat auditorium, an Internet room, a bookshop, a restaurant and a cafe. Film and music programs are planned. Set in the working-class San Paolo district, the foundation replaced a derelict factory belonging to Fergat, a producer of steel wheels for Fiat and other automobile makers. Respectful of the residential and light-manufacturing mix of the historically blue-collar neighborhood (though there is already evidence of the gentrification that cultural institutions typically spawn), Silvestrin specifies that he has created not a museum but "una fabbrica d'arte"--a workshop for art.