Archea, the stone workshop

The Querceta Seravezza workshop (Lucca) is an authoritative witness of this dense and lengthy productive and artistic history; an architecture that anticipates the industrial warehouse genre by a century as a large space with a rectangular layout, marked by gates and openings with a double-pitched roof supported by the harmonic sequence of lattice metal ribs.

But unlike the anonymous prefabricated containers, with its long walls of stone, rocks, bricks and ashlars, the ancient Henraux sawmill differs from the inexpressive condition of most of the productive centres in Italy, instead telling its own story.

The reformation and transformation project led by Archea Associati fits into this narrative perspective, in the successful attempt to interpret and bring out the traces of time by combining the sum of the pre-existing elements with the contemporary signs it did not want to renounce.

Thus, staying in line with the concept of urban artefact recovery, the ancient perimeter walls were brought to light with their irregular and fascinating texture, together with the light lattice beams of the roof and the bridge crane with its chains from the ceiling (considered as objects trouvé), all connected to the new: the grouted smooth-cement floor and the newly built marble staircase that leads to the loft - design elements conceived as white and massive abstract volumes emerging from the ancient building closure without being at all shy.