A new Working Space
The presence of obsolete production settlements within residential urban cores is a common condition in many centres in the northeast of Italy. This is the case of the industrial pavilions of “La Meccanica” from the early 1960s not far from the historic centre of Cittadella (Padua, Italy).
The project proposes the redevelopment of an industrial sector, maintaining both the original site and its function. The project intends to preserve the Factory as a pre-existence of the urban fabric, reconfigured with new functions: “Production” becomes a centre of “Training-Research-Production”.
The functional programme is divided into various interventions: the formal characteristics of the older warehouses are preserved and become spaces for new “Production”; the southern end of the lot (2013-2014) was redesigned by adding a public front to the new building.
The northern edge of the lot hosts new places for “Training” and “Research”. The definition of a new workspace that opens up to the context in which it is included, guided the project for the new office building (2016). The Nucleo di Risalita is an architectural volume which - due to its position and function as a “totem” or “lighthouse” - gives a new identity to the production complex and highlights a new relationship between the workspace and the part of the city into which it fits, and with which it confronts itself with no more borders.
The Capannone Nord (2022), through an autonomous steel structure included in the pre-existing wall profile, makes the spaces flexible but also offers new areas for both the factory and the urban fabric community.
The project, with an essential character, highlights the possibility of restoring shape and balance to the various elements of the building in a logic of “precise rigour”, underlining the productive identity of the company.
The new Lamec headquarters aims to be an enhancing element both for the company and for the neighbouring residential context, a space capable of fostering relationships between inside and outside the Factory.
A new workspace that redesigns the complex relationship between Factory, Production and the urban context.