The Lingotto is, before anything else, a piece of industrial reasoning rendered in reinforced concrete. When construction began in 1916 in the southern outskirts of Turin, the brief was to consolidate FIAT’s scattered workshops into a single plant capable of producing the firm’s expanding range of cars in volume. The engineer Giacomo Matté-Trucco, working in-house at FIAT, organised production along a vertical line rather than the horizontal sheds favoured by American factory practice. Raw materials entered at the ground floor; sub-assemblies and bodies progressed upward through five stacked production levels; finished cars emerged at the top of the building to be driven directly onto the roof. The construction work itself was carried out by the firm of G. A. Porcheddu, a Turin contractor specialised in the Hennebique reinforced-concrete system.

That roof is the gesture that made the Lingotto famous beyond the trade. To absorb the finished cars and run them in, Matté-Trucco laid out a test track 1,500 metres long along the perimeter of the building, with concrete walls and banked corners at the two ends. Helical access ramps at the north and south extremities allowed cars to climb from the production floors to the roof under their own power, then descend the same way once the test run was complete. The factory was the largest of its kind in the world at the moment it opened in 1923, and the rooftop track turned an industrial necessity into a piece of architecture that Le Corbusier, visiting shortly after completion, called “one of the most impressive sights in industry” and, in the same breath, “a guideline for town planning”.

One of the most impressive sights in industry.
— Le Corbusier, on the Lingotto factory

Production continued at the Lingotto for almost six decades. The plant was overtaken in scale and process by FIAT’s much larger Mirafiori works in the post-war years and finally closed in 1982. Rather than demolish a structure that had become an emblem of Turin’s industrial twentieth century, the company launched an international architectural competition for its reuse. The brief was won by Renzo Piano, who set out to convert the long volume into a piece of mixed-use city. The first phase of the conversion was completed by 1989: concert halls, an auditorium, a convention centre, a shopping arcade, a hotel and the headquarters of FIAT itself were inserted into the old production floors, while the eastern wing was given to the Polytechnic University of Turin for its Automotive Engineering faculty. The rooftop test track was kept and is still accessible from the upper levels of the building, with the Pinacoteca Agnelli — the collection assembled by Gianni Agnelli (1921–2003) — installed on the same top floor.