EURODOCKS OFFICES
Executive Offices, Meeting Room; Conference Room.
Gross Floor Area: 600 mq
Eurodocks is the company that handles open-air goods storage operations in the enormous goods yard facing the quayside of the Port of Ravenna.
The area is delimited by colossal travelling cranes mounted on rails, gigantic industrial sheds and a towering silo for grain and cereals, while at the centre, a modest little single-storey building houses the offices from where the movement s of incoming and outgoing goods are managed.
The project involved adding a meeting room for the B.o.D and a number of representative rooms without occupying any further space in the yard, given the need for storage space, by effectively building over the old building within its existing perimeter.
The idea of demolishing the old building to build a completely new one was immediately rejected, and it was decided to effectively encapsulate the old building without altering it in any way, inserting it into a more complex compositional mechanism that emphasises the stratification of needs, that freezes the time that governs things, almost privileging the rules of nature over the artifice of man.
The old entrance, in all its simplicity, thus becomes the new entrance from where two flights of stairs lead to the upper level, the addition of which has absolutely no effect on the building below given that it is supported by an independent external steel structure founded directly on the ground.
The steel structure supports two separate elements, partially covering the old building: a glazed polygonal building with a pointed roof (the meeting room) and a shed with a pitched roof (the staircase, services and a number of representative rooms), while a low tunnel between the two structures houses the air conditioning plant and ventilators, and the flags over the main entrance give the project its definitive profile.
