Automatic Warehouse

Torgiano (PG) - Italy

Type

  • Commercial

Location

  • Torgiano (PG)- Italy

Year

  • 2001

Client

  •  Margaritelli Italia S.p.a.

Activities

  • Preliminary and final design, working drawings 

Costs

  • 6 M euro

Area

  • 3.000 m2

Following a regular building development of the area, the automatic warehouse is the last new building of the plain between Brufa hills and Ponte San Giovanni-Torgiano provincial road.

The project aims to improve the storage system and also all aspects concerning occupational safety. The new automatic warehouse is made of prefabricated aluminium panels and is divided into two opposite buildings of different dimensions. The main building hosts the pallets stock rooms, is a rectangular volume parallel to the existing sheds. It has the same layout of the sheds while conferring unity to the whole industrial plant.

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The other building, for loading and unloading of goods, is smaller and square-shaped. It is placed at the base of the main building and inserted in the space between the wooden retaining wall and the new hill with trees. 

In its structure and external covering, the “first skin” of the large volume of the main building consists entirely of aluminium prefabricated panels installed on a partially emerging concrete structure. 

A second overlapping wooden skin in aluminium architecturally measures to the anonymous prefab box. The wooden covering and its supporting metallic system are, therefore, in their constitution and texture, fundamental elements of the architectural quality of the project. 

Although the used materials and their shape can be considered unusual for an industrial building, the result is much more rooted in history and in classical tradition (horizontal partition of the facade and serial order of the vertical) than in the traditional industrial and serial building construction practices. The formal choices and materials, together with the natural texture enhanced by new trees, create the perfect conditions for the automatic warehouse insertion in the existing environment.