GAM TorinoThe Civica Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea of Turin (GAM) is preparing for a radical transformation designed by MVRDV in collaboration with Balance Architettura, selected through a public competition in December 2025. The recently presented project aims to redefine the museum as an open and permeable space in which the collection, exhibition activity, and urban life are continuously intertwined. The intervention concerns the 1959 modernist building designed by Carlo Bassi and Goffredo Boschetti and updates its operations through a combination of contemporary museum strategies—accessible storage areas, flexible galleries, new public routes—with the goal of restoring the GAM's active role within the city. Construction is scheduled to begin in the second half of 2027.
© MVRDV
The starting point is a building that was already experimental in its original conception: a volume rotated in relation to Turin’s urban grid, an open plan, and a strong focus on natural light. Over time, however, technical and regulatory updates have gradually altered this clarity, closing skylights, fragmenting interiors with successive partitions, and separating the museum from its garden, which is now fenced off and marginalised.
© MVRDV
The project by MVRDV and Balance Architettura addresses precisely this loss of continuity with a gesture of “reopening” that restores spatial legibility: skylights are reactivated, internal subdivisions are almost entirely removed, and the galleries regain a single, continuous spatial depth crossed by natural light. The safety infrastructure is also rethought: external staircases are removed and replaced by a new internal system designed in dialogue with the building’s original staircase.
“Our goal is to reopen the museum as much as possible and bring it back to a condition of spatial clarity,” said Winy Maas, founding partner of MVRDV. The project removes most internal partitions and reactivates natural light by reopening skylights, giving the galleries a more continuous and flexible layout.
© MVRDV
Within this new spatial condition, the museum becomes a highly reconfigurable structure. A grid of suspended tracks between the columns allows walls, curtains, and display systems to be mounted and moved, transforming the galleries into mutable environments adaptable to different curatorial needs.
The most significant transformation, however, takes place underground, where the basement becomes a publicly accessible storage area: the collection is no longer hidden but open to view, in line with an international trend that the studio itself has helped define with projects such as the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the V&A East Storehouse in London.
© MVRDV
At the urban scale, the project introduces a new diagonal passage cutting through the site beneath the museum volume and directly connecting key city polarities, from the historic centre to the Politecnico and the OGR. This passage, partly glazed, functions as a linear public space: an urban threshold rather than a simple route, which at night is illuminated by the visible presence of the storage space below.
© MVRDV
“This type of openness reflects a new idea of the museum as a transparent cultural infrastructure,” the design team emphasises, situating the intervention within a line of research already explored by the studio in projects such as the Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam and the V&A East Storehouse in London.
The project also integrates a strong focus on reuse: original furnishings are recovered and reintroduced into the exhibition spaces, while materials from internal demolitions are reused in the new construction. Targeted interventions also improve skylight performance and the overall efficiency of the building envelope.
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Cover image: Render by © MVRDV
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