GEZA | New Headquarters and Production Complex for PRATIC, Italy

Fuente: GEZA, Media Agency Image
Fotografía: Fernando Guerra FG+SG

GEZA, in the project for the New Headquarters and Production Complex for PRATIC, reinterprets and redefines the notion of industrial space by exhibiting a capacity to combine in the project aspects the firm has been continuously developing and exploring in previous work and research, especially that concerning the design of residential projects.

The quality of landscape design and architectonic detail arises from this combination to ultimately create an example of innovative thinking and technique. Giovanni Damiani, a prominent architectural critic, agrees, “In the work of GEZA there are continuous reminders of the 50s, whether it’s through the techniques employed to design, in changes that may be traced through the facades, or more importantly in the manner in which spaces and details are developed…Neutra, Ellwood, and at times Soriano are no longer Masters whose techniques serve as distant examples, but have become the companions to whom the project refers in terms of details, solutions, joints, and, in the end, of ways to construct and stitch together spaces”.

Damiani describes GEZA’s architecture as one that exhibits the architects’ “obsessive attention to detail, reminiscent of the ability and worksmanship of artisans, whose thorough and rigorous methods became evident even at the scale of construction drawings that were practically self-explanatory to the workers on site”.

“The interplay between architecture and the dry vocabulary of prefabrication creates a unique and sensitive language throughout the project whilst introducing, although unforeseen, certain suggestions about the landscape and the overall intervention”. So states Marco Brizzi, “The notion of a landscape that organizes the project seems to manifest on all levels. Examples of this are seen in the use of materials like the rock utilized for the finish of the panels, rendered more abstract by the black oxide, alludes to the notion of a nature that must acquiesce to the demands of industry.

It is even more evident in the realization of territorial signs, such as the crescent of the parking lot, or in the direct confrontation between the building and the territory that is expressed in the floating shade and the beams that cover the office core, both are elements that seem to extend infinitely towards the cultivated fields of Fagagna”.