NC Headquarters

The project involves the redevelopment of an existing building and its transformation into the headquarters of a construction company, through the demolition and reconstruction of a pre-existing structure located within one of the industrial areas of the city of Bari, along a road that connects the city with the suburban district of San Paolo and the civil airport. Inside, the building houses executive offices, operational spaces, and workshops, as well as a terrace overlooking the Lamasinata canal, the only natural element that interrupts the continuity of the urbanized landscape.

The concept behind the project is to design a small object that acts as a protective refuge within the chaos of the industrial area where it is located, creating inside it a condition of ‘slowness’ in which concentration and creative work can be facilitated and enhanced. It is a compact, almost square-plan block that plastically defines a masonry box with a uniform thickness, except in correspondence with the openings. These, set back within recessed bands relative to the façade line, break the apparent massiveness of the building and reveal the presence of a base, a body, and a crowning element. The building also acts as a hinge between the two levels of the site—resulting from a height difference of about 4 meters—and takes advantage of this condition to create, on one side, a small partially covered entrance square, and on the other, an internal landscaped courtyard. Its dialogue with the street is articulated through a stone wall that supports the building’s white volume and visually detaches it from the ground.

The constructive dimension of the building is based on a tectonic idea of Framptonian origin, in which the discontinuous reinforced concrete structure neither dominates nor denies the continuous logic of the masonry construction. The wall itself, consisting of a single leaf covered with an insulating envelope, is an intimate expression of a plastic–masonry language that achieves a high degree of coherence with the morphological and aesthetic–formal solutions, both at the volumetric level and in the constructive details. The building is monomaterial, entirely plastered in white on its external surfaces, and is ‘cut’ by tall, narrow openings containing black metal frames. These construction choices express the intention to recover a ‘Mediterranean’ and ‘rural’ condition that establishes a dialogue with the natural landscape within a territory now compromised by the presence of industries and factories.