Project: TechnoGym Industrial Park

Architect: Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel and Partners

Location: Cesena, Italy

Function:  The sprawling, multi-use industrial park is the new combined headquarters and production facilities for fitness product manufacturer, Technogym. The complex is visually dominated by its distinctive soaring roof shell, which acts as both a unifying architectural element and a iconic reference point for commuters along the adjacent A14 motorway. Special attention was paid to the design of the multi-story company gymnasium, which offers unobstructed views out onto the surrounding countryside though a double height curved glass wall.  Read more about this project in the Architizer database.

Think you’ve got a better project? Submit it for an Architizer A+ Award!

Images courtesy Leo Torri

more

Let’s face it: For the most part industrial parks are not known for their aesthetic. The endless grids of single-story factory buildings, often found along highway roads, leave much to be desired. Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman has created a playful critique of this architectural bore with his latest work “Little Factory.” The creative mind behind those giant silly sculptures, such as the tipped over bunny rabbit in Sweden or the massive rubber ducky floating down Osaka’s waterways, has created a mini-factory all his own on the side of a freeway in Azeven Noord, a new industrial yard in the Netherlands. His Lego-like construction points out the repetitive and banal nature of these everyday sites, while jovially supporting his artistic endeavors. Read more.

more

The Fabriken Furillen Hotel is a combination of two of our favorite things: unique renovations and remote getaways. Built from the remains of an abandoned limestone quarry, this 16-room boutique hotel embodies the rustic beauty of Sweden by offering clean and simple design, local cuisine, and panoramic views of the ocean year round. Read More.

more

HILL from thismustbetheplace on Vimeo.

For the past seven years, Alan Hill has lived in an old, abandoned Packard factory in Detroit, Michigan. When asked what strikes him as unconventional, he points out the obvious: no hot water, no paper delivered to the front door, and nobody to cut the grass. He also has a sense of humor, recalling the day he first moved in and realized he could park his car inside the house.

Hill is the subject of a beautifully shot installment of This Must Be the Place, a series of short films exploring notions of home. Filmmakers Ben Wu and David Usui follow Hill into an abandoned, 2-acre auto factory, where Hill has taken on the role of a custodian. To most, the piles of debris and scrap metal are unsightly, and the site is the materialization of destitution and disarray—perhaps the antithesis of a home. Hill, however, sees his occupation as a happy marriage. His fringe living has relieved him of the burdens of mortgages and credit card payments. It has afforded him a freedom thought to be extinct, an optimism that seems all but extinguished in ruinous Detroit.  “It’s like having a farm with a roof over it, you know?” he tells the cameras.

But Hill is far from blasé. His occupation of the Albert Khan-designed Packard factory is resistant not only to the system, so to speak, but also to the way America’s cities are changing physically. “These days, you build something out of sheet metal and put some plastic insulation in it, and that’s the home, and that’s the new store, and that’s the new factory. That’s the way the world is. We can’t really dispute it,” he explains. “In 20 years, people won’t even know this place.” But while Hill is alive, this one Packard factory will be too.

[via Vimeo]

more

For those of you still reeling from the Oscars last night (we laughed, we cried), here’s a wonderful video that places four contemporary buildings in Veneto, Italy in the same cinematic splendor as some of the brightest stars to have received that coveted golden statuette. Watch as Tadao Ando’s Factory, Silvia Dainese’s Black Cube, Massimiliano Fuksas‘s Nardini Bull, and Daniel Libeskind’s 9/11 Memorial come to life in this short film, which celebrates each building’s dramatic play with light. Set to scintillating instrumentals, ‘Luce/Light’ guides us through the spaces, allowing us to observe the details and soak in the emotive qualities of each masterful architectural performance.

Luce/Light from Studio-due on Vimeo.

more

Pipe Plant from Sasha Aleksandrov on Vimeo.

It took 2 months of shooting for Moscow-based filmmaker Sasha Aleksandrov to capture the re-painting of the exteriors of an expansive Cold War-era industrial factory. It all unfolds in dramatic time-lapse in less than 4 minutes. To make the video, Aleksandrov shot by hand and on foot, using just a typical Nikon and a tripod. This meant that Aleksandrov, who calls himself an “operator”, had to set up a shot, take it, move the tripod over a foot (or precisely 29 cm, he maintains), before repeating the process thousands of times. He then used an off-the-shelf software to stabilize the shots in post-production.

The result of this intensive labor is a combination of stop-motion and time-lapse photography, otherwise known as hyper-lapse sequences, whereby the footage is made dynamic through the introduction of rotations and pans. So when the camera begins to move, that’s Aleksandrov following along the ground at 11-inch intervals over the course of an afternoon. As for the paint job itself, it’s a kind of Suprematist pastiche with typeface meant for Bolshevik slogans. But any excuse to photograph more decommissioned factories, right?

more

Belgian photographer Filip Dujardin has been getting a lot of attention over the past few years with his combinative photographs of fictional buildings. In these photographs, Dujardin parses together unusual architectural elements, often bringing the backs of buildings into the spotlight and synthesizing forms into tangled or cantilevered constructions. These surreal structures have been likened to old factories along the American rust belt as well as new projects by OMA and work by Steven Holl. More after the jump!

[All images courtesy of the artist]

more

Magnetic Void from James Miller on Vimeo.

Filmmaker James Miller captured the demolition of the British United Shoe Machinery Company in Leicester, England, then reversed the playback to create this moody video. According to Wikipedia, the BUSM was the largest manufacturer of footwear machinery and materials throughout most of the twentieth century and was once, naturally, the largest employer of jobs in Leicester. Things went awry after the company changed hands in the mid-1990′s and numerous lawsuits ensued. Following years of this bureaucratic standoff, the original BUSM  factory was set for demolition to make room for new housing developments.

Miller’s photography surveys the disparate natures between the construction of the decaying factory’s brick and mortar walls and the large hydraulic arms of machinery, which tear into the former with great effortlessness. However you read into the images, one thing is certain: neither the old machinery to which BUSM owed their prosperity, nor their contemporary counterparts can escape entropy’s reach.

more

Given our office’s proximity to Jersey, it’s hard to read about a factory and not stop your brain from recalling images of exhaust-emitting, soot-stained, and visceral, oil-slicked machinery. But this factory isn’t in Jersey. No, given the elementary massing, shiny white interiors, and cutesy flower sgrafitto, it’s got to be in Japan. More after the jump.

more

more