Trimble Innovation Center
Since decades, Trimble has been a leader in geospatial technologies applied to the construction industry. After the acquisition from Google of the popular 3D Sketchup software, and from Frank Gehry Partners of the renowned software and hardware development company Gehry Technologies, Trimble has recently become a reference also in the field of architecture. The idea of an Innovation Center - and the Italian one is the first created by Trimble worldwide - stems from the need for a versatile space capable of effectively showcasing the operation of increasingly advanced and complex systems that feature a remarkable software content. Starting from these assumptions, the project aims to express both the corporate culture as well as the main features of a contemporary environment, where high technology, flexibility and rapid alternation of use - to which IT systems and platforms contribute in a decisive way - lead to the concept of a spatially fluid, functionally hybrid and typologically neutral architectural environment. The inspiration came from the same point cloud technologies developed by the company: a set of millions of digitally captured points, which allow to build interactive 3D models of objects or places. The result is a space that tends to the same immateriality and adaptability of a point cloud, with an architecture made of few elements and suitable for an array of different uses and contents. The space is a large workshop, a meeting room, a reception room, but also a warehouse and test center for systems and instruments, according to an intrinsic and wide functional variety expressed and condensed in the large central room: open to the landscape through its large windows, and to the world through its large video screen. Instead of fragmenting the interior space continuity introducing vertical partitions, which are reduced to a minimum, internal compartments are obtained horizontally, through the large wooden surfaces, the same flooring material. These latter, in addition to defining a principle of visual and
spatial continuity both inside and with the surrounding landscape, conceal the necessary storage spaces. The project is an introverted topography and a space whose character is based on light, on the quality of its materials and on the virtual absence of boundaries with the outside.
