VDP Engineering Office
Carlo Berarducci designed the interiors of an engineering office using raw and poor materials typical of road infrastructure, such as concrete and iron.
The project is conceived as an open space made by few raw and poor materials in contrast with polished green lacquered surfaces metaphors of the studio activity focused on infrastructures environmental impact studies on landscapes and urban areas.
The main challenge was to leave the working space as much open as possible to catch the light coming thought the long uninterrupted window wall facing the street outside, and at the same time make it possible having privacy and separation between different working areas as asked from the associates clients.
This has been made possible by emptying completely the space from all existing partitions, spoiling all the structural pills and beams from plaster, to leave it completely open and naked, and then refilling it only with three like box volumes to separate the different areas.
All services has been included inside an iron volume on the back side of the long windowed space. The reception desk, archives, baths, the kitchen and a measurement instruments room, have been concentrated inside a straight shape covered by iron sheets with iron doors set on the opposite side of the long windows side, that works as an unifying back to the open space, ending over the reception desk with a sloping ceiling incumbent on the hall soon behind the entrance door.
Two other box like volumes painted in black contain principal, director and amministrative rooms, facing the windows and separating the working open space partitioned by glass walls with acoustic valence, in group of four work platforms. The work stations are organized over a single strongly jutting iron table for each room, in continuity with shelves below the windows running all across the office.
An unique light box ceiling with a simple rectangular shape illuminate all the spaces with uniform light crossing all the rooms, further unifying the spaces in a whole one. While all installations are exposed with their metal sheets tubes and air machines leaved naked hanging from the ceiling.
Few materials are used, the concrete of the spoiled concrete of preexisting pillars and beams, new concrete tiles pavements and new wall concrete plaster; the flamed natural iron sheets used as wall covering for the service spaces and for the jutting tables, and green polished timber gratings used as back to the reception desk, the waiting open room and the meeting room. A custom deigned glass table for the meeting room is made by two green glass basis and an ultralight glass plan, while the directors tables are the Norman Foster design Nomos by Tecno, with Artemide table lamps.
The gross internal surface of the whole office is about 300 sqm, to host a reception, a waiting area, three directive rooms, one instruments room, plus fifteen open work station and a meeting and conference room for fourteen people, for a total of twenty-two to twenty-eigth people working inside.
The aims was to achieve a stimulant and exiting environment with a strong impact on people working inside as well as on people coming from outside, at the same time informal and casual as a working laboratory, letting the activities of the studio being completely visible and making people interact between each other.
