Almost all industrial companies grow the same way, and it is normal that they do: first the production hall, where things are made and revenue is generated; then, as the company grows, the offices, added alongside. Two buildings, two construction sites, two eras. The result is a whole that works, but has grown by additions, with little coherence.
First the hall, then the offices
It is the story of a great many businesses, and it has its logic: you start from what generates value, production, and the building follows the work. The offices come later, when more people are needed to manage. Each piece was born at the right moment, answering a real need.
Over time, though, those pieces tell their own story: routes born of successive additions, different entrances, a quality of environment far apart between shop floor and management. The company has grown, and its space has remained the sum of different stages.
The moment comes to rethink the whole
At some point something happens: a new hall to build, a generational handover, an expansion, the desire to present the company better to clients and candidates. That is the right moment to stop adding pieces and look at the company as a whole. An office building and a production hall become a single organism, to be rethought with one single design.
Offices inside production
In Bolgare, for Gualini Lamiere International, we designed the offices suspended above the production area. A volume looking directly onto the work, with meeting rooms overlooking the shop floor. The hall itself is conceived around how the company produces: the structure houses an overhead crane lifting up to 50 tonnes, and the whole building is designed around that handling.
Management, this way, lives in contact with production and sees it every day; and production feels like the heart of the company, in full view.
One building, all the functions
In Calcinate, for Marlegno, we went further: the Innovation Building Center brings together production, research and management in a single building of 25,000 square metres. One architecture, one image, one place where the company's different souls live together. It is a timber building, LEED Gold certified and awarded for its smart management: proof that a production facility can be coherent, sustainable and representative at the same time.
Why it matters
Designing the whole company, and not just half of it, has very concrete effects. The movement of people and materials becomes simpler. The company's identity is one, readable by those who enter as well as by those who work there. And the quality of work is not a privilege of those in the office: it concerns everyone, including those who spend the day on the shop floor. At a time when finding and keeping people in production is harder and harder, it is an advantage that shows.
What it means
Whoever looks only at the offices sees half the company. We design the whole company – where it thinks and where it produces – as a single organism. This is what we mean when we say your space our project.