Piuarch conceives the cogent Fendi Factory in Florence, Italy, as a suspended garden
By means of variety and perform, can a office set reverential dialogue with its organic context, though catering to its have spatial and programmatic prerequisites and revitalising its discharged web page?
Milan-dependent studio Piuarch collaborated with Fendi Maison to conceive the Fendi Manufacturing unit, as a discreet but cogent contemporary architecture “that disappears into the landscape, placing by itself in open up dialogue with the surrounding mother nature.” According to the Italian architects and Fendi’s Architecture Section, the low-profile building resting amid the rolling hills of Bagno a Ripoli in Florence, Italy, is built distinctive with its lifted backyard garden which essays twin functions—that of “mending a very long-standing rift in the terrain and recreating the hillside of the website in which it is situated.” The advanced and the one-storey structure consists of management and administrative places of work, a restaurant, a creation warehouse, workshops and a university for haute leather-based merchandise, “with the intent of absolutely expressing the luxurious brand’s extraordinary high quality and significant standards.”
Modest nevertheless visually placing, the new complex of the fashion brand’s generation developing bases alone on ‘practicality,’ spread throughout 14,000 sqm in the Tuscan countryside, and accompanied by a ‘high standard’ of landscape layout and highly developed strength efficiency, as “the brainchild of the Maison that seeks to merge the excellence of its product or service with the generation of an architectural landmark having sizeable aesthetic and environmental benefit,” the collaborators notify. Piuarch sought to interpret this principle in this contextual architecture, which will become an vital fragment of its purely natural and urban environment, “relatively than a mere graft.”




The Fendi Factory is developed on a single amount, its supposed horizontality building a “free kind driven by the desires of the creation course of action,” the Milan-dependent studio claims. The spaces’ practicality essays the conceptual theory of the website strategy, integrating assorted capabilities and applications into fluid pathways that operate horizontally through the present-day design and style. Transparent walls within grow to be the backbone of the circulatory and connecting spaces, visually uniting and enhancing the building’s distinct makes use of in tandem with encouraging consumers and people to move about, socialise with each individual other and have interaction with the building’s spatiality.
The idea was to reconstruct a all-natural landscape through architecture that disappears in the landscape by itself. When an architectural project also features a landscape challenge, the symbiosis with the setting develops by natural means.
– Gino Garbellini, co-founder and lover, Piuarch
Piuarch outlined the idea of the business office design, outlined in its first phases with landscape architect Antonio Perazzi, with an aim to elucidate situations for a renewed visible collaboration concerning the architecture and the setting. “The characteristics of the web site, impacted by the logic of relying on the brick market and the quarry once operating on the great deal, required restoration perform and prompted the thought of interpreting the design of the output intricate as an option to establish good land management dynamics,” shares the architecture and urban preparing business launched in Milan in 1996 by Francesco Fresa, Germán Fuenmayor, Gino Garbellini, and Monica Tricario.




In accordance to Gino Garbellini, co-founder and partner, Piuarch, the job was chosen as component of a competition by invitation organised in 2017, which was adopted by the commissioning of the structure up to the executive section. “Piuarch was preferred by Fendi due to the fact (our) firm’s proposal was the just one that greatest interpreted the Maison’s ask for to make an architecture of wonderful aesthetic and environmental value that would categorical the excellence of Fendi solutions,” he said. The style property conveyed a temporary to design a ‘new Hub of Excellence,’ “intended to accommodate and enhance the operate of artisans and gurus. Hence, our 1st move and priority was to realize the performing of every output activity, finding out the stream and routes that would make them effective while augmenting workflow, when transferring to a aim of designing an productive functional distribution with the complicated,” Garbellini proceeds.
The ensuing style method, as relayed by Garbellini, is primarily based on the plan of the contextual design and style finding its ‘ideal form’ by means of the best practical arrangement of all its sections. Piuarch then considered the magnanimous encompassing context, of respecting the landscape which the built intervention calls property. “So the strategy of organising the workspaces only on a person floor, the ground level, at the height of the current factory was born, with the basement housing the parking lots and the cafeteria on the initially. The move of the personnel routes and goods flow horizontally, and the necessary functions, with their size and condition, drew the program of the setting up,” Garbellini clarifies.




The constructing as an extended backyard
The business office architecture, therefore, drew from its site’s created heritage and manages to strike an ‘open dialogue’ with its pure surroundings. “It was the landscape that advised the variety and language of the job. The need was to fill and restore, by our intervention, the hilly ecosystem formerly emptied by the clay quarry and kiln. The outcome is consequently a office marked by effectiveness and performance, but normally in relation and open dialogue with the encompassing mother nature: the developing, evidently hypogeal many thanks to the landscaping decision of generating a steady and intensive green roof, will become an built-in ecological procedure that reconstructs and recreates the morphology and contours of the land to restore the condition of the authentic hillside. The large roof back garden serves equally an environmental functionality and a social and local community-led one, turning into a consumer-helpful space and a landmark location for workforce to socialise,” observes Garbellini.




With each and every fee, Piuarch pursues the most thrilling obstacle in architecture: to strengthen the city, the lives of its inhabitants and the ailments for residing alongside one another, while respecting the diversity of every specific. “It is an technique addressing specific basic aspects: consolation and constructiveness, nicely-staying and sustainability. That’s why, architecture turns into a meaningful location, a new surroundings that transcends the purposeful place, a location where by people today and landscapes relate,” describes the layout crew.
The environmentally friendly roof that assists transcend the linear building into a hallmark, is presented aid in the kind of hollowed-out patios, disrupting its own monotonous continuity and channeling organic light into its sparse but cosy interior layout. This intentional element is what injects vitality and id to the single storey construction, counterbalancing with its context and undertaking roles of enhancing organic ventilation and an inflow of daylight.




Commenting on the material and colour palette, Garbellini said—”the use of resources evoke the colours of the location, while the clear external and inner walls, all make certain a visual and actual physical, just about osmotic trade involving the synthetic and natural environments, in between the interior and exterior.” The building’s pores and skin employ a organic combine of earth and cement, accompanied by glass, reflecting the nuanced colour shades of the Tuscan hills, enabling Fendi’s new headquarters to synchronise with its environment. the building’s outer walls use a organic combine of earth and cement, along with glass, in a characteristic shade that reflects the colour nuances of the Tuscan hills. The inside functions terracotta cladding, built by Fendi, which remembers the materials of the existing kiln.




From its eco-friendly roof to the intensive courtyard styles, its minimum interiors and the industrial park surrounding the Italian architecture rests on the thought to transform the whole internet site into ‘a new and prolonged back garden,’ enhancing the good quality of the doing work areas, “to fortify the priority of the client’s work: a dedication to escalating accountability toward the setting and modern society,” suggests Garbellini.
The Fendi Manufacturing unit designed by Piuarch also addresses troubles of making a significant architectural landmark with a exceptional nonetheless muted aesthetic, a constructing that imbibes respecting and valuing the ecosystem conceiving a sustainable and caring workspace regenerating a dismissed web page or striking a visually interesting link among the designed and the purely natural landscape even though tackling an successful functional distribution of spaces in the course of the sophisticated.




Undertaking Facts
Name: Fendi Factory

Area: Bagno a Ripoli, Florence, Italy

Place: 14,000 sqm

Year of completion: 2022

Architect and Interior Designer: Piuarch

Layout workforce: Francesco Fresa, Germán Fuenmayor, Gino Garbellini, Monica Tricario with Antonio Perazzi
