A courthouse is usually visible from far off: a flight of steps, columns, power striking a pose. Not here. Gabetti, Isola and Varaldo designed it as an artificial hill planted with trees, partly buried, with pools of water and a portico stitching the building to the city. It was built in the eighties and finished in 1987.
What to see
It stands at the northern entrance of Alba, on a triangular site between the railway and the bridge over the Tanaro: a crossing point the municipality had wanted to sort out for years. The design took the road opposite to monumentality, for all its considerable size, thinking about the relation between built work and greenery and refusing the rhetoric that usually goes with buildings of justice.
Gabetti and Isola are among the most important Italian architects of the later twentieth century, and in Piedmont they nearly always worked like this: against the building as monument, in favour of construction that leans on the landscape. The judicial offices left in 2015 and today the structure holds other public offices, but the work has stayed as it was.
Visiting
The building houses offices, so the interiors are seen during working hours; the outside and the green parts can be walked freely. Half an hour.
Our editors' tip
Go up on top. The roof is a wooded hill you can walk on, and walking it you realise you are on the roof of a courthouse. Many people in Alba use it as a green space without thinking about what is underneath, and that is exactly what the architects wanted: a public building that lets itself be walked over.
