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Architects: JSPA Design
- Area: 9400 m²
- Year: 2021
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Photographs:Schran Images
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Manufacturers: Appleton Special Glass
Text description provided by the architects. Located in Ningwu, Shanxi province, the project consisted of the creation of an Oatmeal factory, transforming raw oat into flour products. The production process, mostly automated, needed two different production lines with high-volume machinery and spaces open to the public with shop, café, and office spaces.
The surroundings of the project offered very low quality with newly constructed industrial buildings, dry landscape, and coal mines and it seemed interesting to develop the factory as an introverted building that would recreate its own natural environment. Besides satisfying all functional requirements, we thought of the project as a building that stimulates the human senses, that would propose a surprising experience to the visitor. The idea was to use a system of brick walls to enclose and hide the various technical spaces of the factory into an opaque ground floor and to set-up, a simple concrete volume on the top of it, to host all the public spaces of the program. Patios and large gardens will pierce the whole building, to provide natural light while creating impressive spatial dilatations within the factory. Central production spaces will also get natural light from concrete sheds, opening the roof to the north light.
The system of brick walls starts from the front of the factory, where a landscape area is voluntarily left open to the use of the local community with benches and water pools for kids to play. Brick walls grow slowly from benches shape to become the propriety fence of the factory and later, the façade of the whole building. The shape taken by the brick walls will form and define the different entrances of the factory, each of them with a specific function: The raw materials delivery, the products loading, the staff, and the visitor entry. Separated into distinct paths, staff and visitors will never crossways inside the factory and while the workers will enjoy a functional organization, the visitor, will go through a planned spatial experience. For one moment only, the production line is showcased to the visitor in an elevated corridor overlooking the workshop.
The dormitory for employees was set up in the back of the factory and conceived as an invisible architecture. The brick fence wall was thickened to host the building and patios were created to bring light to the rooms while preserving their intimacy. The space between the factory and the dorm becomes a garden in which a concrete table and square seats were set up.
The choice of construction materials carries a strong meaning: the use of grey brick is a way to create a deep relationship with the site, using local construction methods. Exposed concrete, on the other hand, emphasizes the modernity of the building and allows structure and architecture to be bound together. The landscape design is also fully integrated into the design process and rainwater collected on the roof is redirected to water pools on different levels through cast-in-place concrete water exhausts, making the natural circulation of rainwater part of the experience of the space. The water flows until the entrance of the factory where the last waterfall, combined with a twelve meters cantilever concrete logo wall invites the visitor to enter the architecture.
Across the design process, some regulatory issues were solved through design. Fire-fighting regulations required a water container on the roof that we decided to design as an independent element, a cantilevered stainless-steel box, like a sculpture on the roof.
