Italian architecture studio Piuarch has completed a production factory for fashion brand Fendi in Florence, which has a green roof to “look like an elevated garden”.
Located in the municipality of Bagno a Ripoli, Piuarch collaborated with landscape architect Antonio Perazzi to design a factory that would resemble its surroundings.
“The Fendi Production Building looks like an elevated garden, designed to repair a long-standing rift in the site and recreate the hillside of the site in which it is located,” said Piuarch partner and co-founder Gino Garbellini.
“The architecture therefore establishes an open dialogue with its natural environment,” he told Dezeen. “The building, apparently underground due to the landscaping choice to create a continuous and extensive green roof, becomes an integrated ecological system that recreates the contours of the land to restore the shape of the original hill.”
According to Piuarch, the 14,000 square meter building is designed to be energy efficient and is predicted to achieve LEED Platinum certification this year.
The factory’s exterior walls are constructed from a mixture of earth and cement, chosen to refer to earthy colors found in the Tuscan hills.
The interior walls were covered in terracotta cladding designed by Fendi. Large expanses of glazing provide views of a central courtyard and the exterior landscape.
“The green roof offers the advantage of effectively counteracting the so-called heat island effect caused by a new construction with such a large area,” said Garbellini.
“The massiveness of the roof is contrasted by the use of large glass surfaces and patios that allow natural light to be exploited.”
Piuarch organized the layout of the factory over one floor, informed by the factory’s production process.
As well as the production warehouse, the building houses office spaces, a restaurant, workshops and a school for luxury leather goods.
The workspaces and circulation spaces are broken up with courtyards and planted patios that allow natural light into the interior spaces.
“The concept is based on the idea that the project can find its ideal form through the best functional arrangement of all its parts,” said Garbellini.
“The first step was therefore to understand the functioning of each activity, study flows and routes, with the aim of designing an efficient functional distribution,” continued the architect.
“Then we addressed the issue of context, of respect for the landscape in which the intervention is located. This led to the idea of organizing the workspaces only on one floor, the ground floor.”
A basement has parking and on the top floor is the restaurant that overlooks the green roof.
Other recently completed factories with the environment in mind include a factory in Veitnam with plant-covered facades and a mass-timber Passivhaus factory in Norway designed by architecture firm BIG.
The photography is by Andrea Ferrari, unless noted.
