Food Container Remixed / Spacelab Architects

Architects: Spacelab architects – Luca Silenzi
Location: Fermo, Italy
Collaborators: Roberto Sargo, Zoè Chantall Monterubbiano
Structural Engineering: Giampiero Luzi
Technical Inspection: arch. Luca Silenzi, arch. Roberto Sargo
Contractor: G.I.L. Costruzioni, Porto San Giorgio (Italy)
Constructive System: Precast concrete + metal structure; custom made precast exterior enclosure panels
Project year: 2006-2007
Construction year: 2008
Site area: 7200 sqm
Constructed Area: 2600 sqm
Photographs: ©Luca Silenzi

From box to hypercube. This brand new commercial building is a part of a wider urban district planned from Spacelab Architecture since 2006 in the city of Porto Sant`Elpidio – middle Italy, in the course of completion. The client brief was to realize the maximum formal impact in the limits of precast construction and basic tipology dictated by the medium-commercial function. We intended this limits as an occasion to conduct the modular precast construction to new formal results.

Mixing two structural systems {precast concrete grid + metal reticular truss}, the box resulting from urban plan parameters {maximum surface and height} is made more complicated in the entrance side by a tridimensional prismatic intrusion in the original volume, distinguished by using glass and other traslucent materials in comparison to other opaque fronts.

The result is a distorsion of perception near the main facade overlooking the public space, inside a more basic/stereometric frame. The other sides are charaterized by a precast custom-made concrete envelope, which module is denied by a continue abstract texture visually connecting each panel to the contiguous. Windows are obtaided by subtracting material inside the texture pattern.