Piuarch conceives the cogent Fendi Factory in Florence, Italy, as a suspended garden
By means of kind and function, can a workplace set reverential dialogue with its purely natural context, whilst catering to its own spatial and programmatic specifications and revitalising its discharged web page?
Milan-dependent studio Piuarch collaborated with Fendi Maison to conceive the Fendi Manufacturing facility, as a discreet but cogent up to date architecture “that disappears into the landscape, inserting itself in open up dialogue with the bordering mother nature.” According to the Italian architects and Fendi’s Architecture Division, the very low-profile creating resting amid the rolling hills of Bagno a Ripoli in Florence, Italy, is designed distinct with its elevated garden which essays twin functions—that of “mending a lengthy-standing rift in the terrain and recreating the hillside of the web-site in which it is situated.” The intricate and the single-storey construction incorporates management and administrative offices, a cafe, a manufacturing warehouse, workshops and a college for haute leather-based items, “with the intent of entirely expressing the luxury brand’s excellent high-quality and substantial requirements.”
Modest nevertheless visually putting, the new elaborate of the style brand’s creation constructing bases by itself on ‘practicality,’ unfold across 14,000 sqm in the Tuscan countryside, and accompanied by a ‘high standard’ of landscape style and innovative power performance, as “the brainchild of the Maison that seeks to combine the excellence of its solution with the development of an architectural landmark having major aesthetic and environmental worth,” the collaborators inform. Piuarch sought to interpret this notion in this contextual architecture, which will become an vital fragment of its natural and city environment, “somewhat than a mere graft.”
The Fendi Manufacturing unit is designed on a solitary degree, its intended horizontality building a “free variety pushed by the requirements of the generation method,” the Milan-centered studio claims. The spaces’ practicality essays the conceptual basic principle of the web page system, integrating varied features and applications into fluid pathways that operate horizontally by the contemporary design. Transparent walls inside develop into the spine of the circulatory and connecting spaces, visually uniting and enhancing the building’s different works by using in tandem with encouraging end users and website visitors to move around, socialise with every single other and engage with the building’s spatiality.
The notion was to reconstruct a pure landscape by way of architecture that disappears inside the landscape alone. When an architectural venture also includes a landscape venture, the symbiosis with the surroundings develops naturally.
– Gino Garbellini, co-founder and companion, Piuarch
Piuarch outlined the principle of the place of work layout, described in its original phases with landscape architect Antonio Perazzi, with an aim to elucidate circumstances for a renewed visual collaboration among the architecture and the ecosystem. “The features of the website, impacted by the logic of relying on the brick sector and the quarry after operating on the ton, required restoration do the job and prompted the notion of decoding the development of the manufacturing intricate as an prospect to build positive land management dynamics,” shares the architecture and urban setting up firm started in Milan in 1996 by Francesco Fresa, Germán Fuenmayor, Gino Garbellini, and Monica Tricario.
According to Gino Garbellini, co-founder and husband or wife, Piuarch, the challenge was chosen as aspect of a competitiveness by invitation organised in 2017, which was followed by the commissioning of the style up to the government phase. “Piuarch was decided on by Fendi for the reason that (our) firm’s proposal was the just one that ideal interpreted the Maison’s ask for to make an architecture of wonderful aesthetic and environmental benefit that would specific the excellence of Fendi solutions,” he mentioned. The style property conveyed a short to style and design a ‘new Hub of Excellence,’ “developed to accommodate and enhance the work of artisans and industry experts. Consequently, our very first stage and precedence was to comprehend the performing of every creation exercise, learning the circulation and routes that would make them effective when augmenting workflow, while shifting in the direction of a aim of planning an economical purposeful distribution with the complex,” Garbellini proceeds.
The ensuing structure technique, as relayed by Garbellini, is based mostly on the plan of the contextual structure getting its ‘ideal form’ by the ideal useful arrangement of all its elements. Piuarch then viewed as the magnanimous encompassing context, of respecting the landscape which the constructed intervention phone calls residence. “So the plan of organising the workspaces only on a person ground, the ground degree, at the top of the present factory was born, with the basement housing the parking lots and the cafeteria on the to start with. The flow of the staff routes and products circulation horizontally, and the demanded functions, with their sizing and form, drew the plan of the constructing,” Garbellini clarifies.
The building as an extended backyard garden
The office environment architecture, consequently, drew from its site’s built heritage and manages to strike an ‘open dialogue’ with its pure surroundings. “It was the landscape that prompt the type and language of the challenge. The motivation was to fill and restore, by means of our intervention, the hilly setting earlier emptied by the clay quarry and kiln. The outcome is for that reason a workplace marked by efficiency and features, but constantly in relation and open up dialogue with the encompassing nature: the building, evidently hypogeal many thanks to the landscaping choice of building a steady and intensive eco-friendly roof, becomes an built-in ecological technique that reconstructs and recreates the morphology and contours of the land to restore the form of the initial hillside. The wide roof back garden serves each an environmental operate and a social and neighborhood-led one, turning out to be a person-pleasant place and a landmark location for staff to socialise,” observes Garbellini.
With just about every fee, Piuarch pursues the most thrilling problem in architecture: to increase the town, the life of its inhabitants and the conditions for living jointly, though respecting the variety of each and every individual. “It is an approach addressing particular elementary elements: convenience and constructiveness, nicely-getting and sustainability. For this reason, architecture gets a significant environment, a new natural environment that transcends the functional area, a area where by folks and landscapes relate,” clarifies the style and design workforce.
The environmentally friendly roof that helps transcend the linear developing into a hallmark, is specified relief in the form of hollowed-out patios, disrupting its individual monotonous continuity and channeling pure gentle into its sparse yet cosy interior layout. This intentional aspect is what injects vitality and id to the solitary storey composition, counterbalancing with its context and carrying out roles of maximizing organic air flow and an influx of daylight.
Commenting on the materials and color palette, Garbellini said—”the use of components evoke the colors of the area, even though the transparent external and internal walls, all ensure a visual and actual physical, almost osmotic trade involving the artificial and pure environments, in between the interior and exterior.” The building’s skin make use of a normal mix of earth and cement, accompanied by glass, reflecting the nuanced color shades of the Tuscan hills, enabling Fendi’s new headquarters to synchronise with its environment. the building’s outer walls use a pure combine of earth and cement, along with glass, in a attribute shade that demonstrates the colour nuances of the Tuscan hills. The interior functions terracotta cladding, developed by Fendi, which remembers the substance of the present kiln.
From its environmentally friendly roof to the considerable courtyard models, its small interiors and the industrial park surrounding the Italian architecture rests on the thought to renovate the overall site into ‘a new and extended yard,’ enhancing the good quality of the functioning spaces, “to strengthen the precedence of the client’s work: a commitment to rising accountability to the setting and modern society,” states Garbellini.
The Fendi Manufacturing unit designed by Piuarch also addresses problems of producing a important architectural landmark with a one of a kind still muted aesthetic, a creating that imbibes respecting and valuing the setting conceiving a sustainable and caring workspace regenerating a dismissed website or striking a visually interesting connection between the created and the pure landscape even though tackling an productive practical distribution of spaces in the course of the complicated.
Task Facts
Name: Fendi Manufacturing facility

Locale: Bagno a Ripoli, Florence, Italy

Location: 14,000 sqm

Calendar year of completion: 2022

Architect and Interior Designer: Piuarch

Style staff: Francesco Fresa, Germán Fuenmayor, Gino Garbellini, Monica Tricario with Antonio Perazzi