The Milanese studio has collaborated with the Maison Fendi by designing an architecture that disappears into the landscape, placing itself in an open dialogue with the surrounding nature

A suspended garden that heals an ancient fracture in the territory and recomposes the hilly layout of the site in which it is inserted. This is how the new Fendi production building in Bagno a Ripoli presents itself (FI), whose project concept was conceived and developed by the Milanese studio Piuarch and subsequently continued and coordinated by the Architecture Department of Fendi.

A complex of about 14,000 sq m that rises in the Tuscan countryside, conceived on the basis of high landscape criteria and high energy efficiency, born from the desire of the Maison to combine the excellence of its product with the creation of a sign architecture of great aesthetic and environmental value.

A request interpreted by Piuarch through a project that becomes an integral part of the landscape rather than a graft.

Starting from an innovative approach, the studio has designed a building that develops horizontally on a single level composing a free form as determined by the needs of the production process. The functionality of the spaces therefore becomes the compositional principle of the plan that combines different functions, merging them into fluid paths that cross it horizontally.

A "backbone" connecting the spaces, with transparent walls, also visually connects the different functions and promotes the circulation and socialization of people.

The complex houses executive and administrative offices, a restaurant, a production warehouse, laboratories and a school of high-end leather goods, with the aim of fully expressing the exceptional quality and high standards of the luxury brand.

The project concept, defined in the preliminary phase together with the landscape architect Antonio Perazzi, aims to define the conditions for a renewed collaboration between architecture and environment.

The characteristics of the place, marked by the logic of exploitation of the brick industry and the quarry previously active on the lot, have in fact required a rehabilitation intervention and suggested the opportunity to interpret the creation of the production complex as an opportunity to establish virtuous management dynamics of the territory.

The architecture is thus placed in an open dialogue with the surrounding nature: the building, apparently underground thanks to the landscape choice of creating a continuous and intensive green roof, becomes an integrated ecological system that reconstructs the morphology of the land and restores shape to the original hill.

A vast hanging garden that has a function that is not only environmental but also social and collective, becoming a usable space and place for employees to socialize.

“The idea was to reconstruct a natural landscape through an architecture that disappears within the landscape itself. When an architectural project is also a landscape project, the symbiosis with the environment develops naturally” says Gino Garbellini, partner of the Piuarch studio.

The green roof, dug out by patios that interrupt its continuity and illuminate the interior spaces, thus emerges as a landmark of the project. A sign that extends the identity and function of the new production site to the surrounding area, with which it establishes an unprecedented system of balances: ventilation and natural light, use of materials that recall the colors of the place, transparent external and internal walls, guarantee an almost osmotic visual and physical exchange between the artificial and natural environment, between inside and outside.

From the green roof, to the courtyards, to the industrial park that surrounds it, the idea was to transform the entire lot into a new and extensive garden, also acting as the objective is to improve the quality of the work spaces, to underline what the client indicates as a priority of his work: the commitment to ever greater responsibility towards the environment and society.