The mantle of international rooftop garden design might have a new crown jewel following Camerana&Partners’ completion of the La Pista 500 project for legendary Italian automaker FIAT in the country’s motorsports capital of Turin.

Promoted by the Pinacoteca Agnelli as a “manifesto of sustainability and inclusivity as well as a suspended public art project”, the project also serves to showcase FIAT’s new 500 model EV design while playing host to a series of art installations filled with approximately 40,000 plants. It is located atop the company’s historic 1923 Lingotto factory building (later converted into a mixed-use space by Renzo Piano) and retains, as a symbolic feature, the site’s original 1.1 km (.683 mile) long test track that starred in the 1969 crime caper The Italian Job.

That track is now the exclusive domain of electric cars (and other non-combustion engine vehicles), with a network of 28 individual islands and other naturalistic obstacles placed deliberately to slow drivers. Its core public art program will be installed piecemeal over the course of the next three years and promises to include a host of challenging site-specific works that speak to the natural-industrial dichotomy presented by the architecture while also engaging visitors to reflect on the meaning of public space. 

A total of 300 native plant species are included on the roofscape altogether, arranged into five thematic sections, and selected to reflect seasonal changes as they die and are replaced. Beneath the track lies a new fourth-floor gallery space called the Casa 500 that was designed by the Roman studio LAB71 architetti. It showcases FIAT's industrial lineage and includes a temporary exhibition area that will first be occupied by Stefano Boeri, who will explore the concept of "Green Obsession" through four examples of verticle forests.

“The Pista 500 is the largest roof garden in Europe, and the decision to build it on the roof of an early 20th-century factory has a highly symbolic value for us: a place that a hundred years ago was a source of pollution par excellence, and a track that was secret and inaccessible at the time, and which now becomes a garden open to all the inhabitants of Turin,” the company's CEO Olivier François said in a statement. “All this highlights the fact that our aim is not just to promote cars: our new path also includes care for the climate, the community and culture.”