
Gruppo Vergero
Headquarters
It’s just a matter of looks, nothing is waste or usable material, nothing is beautiful or ugly, it just depends on how you look at it. The twentieth century had a strong link between the idea of beauty and what had been its opposite, something that no longer had a reason to exist, therefore a refusal.
Umberto Boccioni used different materials, wood, iron, copper, cardboard, essential to convey the poetics of dynamism and expansion in space. Picasso produced sculptures by combining different forms that surprise with irony and expressive force, the work Bull’s Head built with the handlebars and saddle of an old bicycle, is an example. Marcel Duchamp created works using object and objects assembled to create ready-mades. Putting together the scraps of everyday life of the consumer society, recycling and reusing disused objects, aggregating and accumulating fragments of splinters are the ways that many artists have in common.
The artist activates a redemption of the material: what was previously considered waste is recovered and elevated to a work of art. Through the generative process of art, it gives new life to materials and objects otherwise destined not only to be thrown away, but to pollute land and water.
Date 2021
State Competition, Honorable Mention
Location Turin, Italy
Category Offices

There is an art in creating recycling, so we can speak of recycling as a form of art, an opportunity to seek beauty even in the apparent ugliness. Waste of all kinds and various materials acquire a new image, a new life. A material can be read, classified, differentiated, separated, subdivided, it can dialogue with other materials by integrating to create new forms and new stories in a process of continuous metamorphosis.
A waste material has an appearance that can be ugly, it may be a fragment, it may be torn, but its properties produce emotions.If we look at biological cycles, at life, we realize that nothing is waste.Everything, like energy and matter, is transformed, acquires new value, new identity. The alchemy of recycling makes waste a training ground for ingenuity.

A material can be read, classified, differentiated, separated, subdivided, it can dialogue with other materials by integrating to create new forms and new stories in a process of continuous metamorphosis.
Our location is an area bounded on the north side by the North ring road of Turin and on the south side by Corso Cuneo, a driveway dedicated to the accessibility of the industrial sites that characterize the area. The intervention concerns three functionally distinct areas: the industrial warehouse, used for waste selection and recovery activities, the logistics base, dedicated to the positioning of bins and compactors, at the service of heavy vehicles, and the new building which is the fulcrum of the complex as it is dedicated to the administrative headquarters of the company, but above all an opportunity to enhance the entire area owned by Vergero.
The design proposal was born as a response to what are considered to be the main needs of the Company, according to its specificity in the industrial field and its location: a solution strongly characterized in the architectural language, which is found in the quality of the spaces, internal and external , and in their mutual relationship. An autonomous organism with respect to the context in which it is inserted, manifest in dealing with the outside, but introverted in the development of life inside.
The main aspects for the genesis of the project are:
The need to create a shield with respect to the ring road, which represented a physical, acoustic and visual separation between the road and the space dedicated to the offices: the internal space, which is as far back as the road, and the external space, which wants to be the continuation of the first and guaranteeing adequate comfort to its inhabitants.
The architectural homogeneity of the intervention, to unify, through a common language, the entire complex, functionally made up of several ‘parts’.
The recognition of the intervention, which intends to represent the identity of the company, its relevance in the sector in which it operates and the innovation aspect it represents in terms of production processes.


The envelope of the building, which extends beyond it, characterizing the entire intervention area, consists of a framework made with cylindrical elements in recycled plastic, which are partly hollow, partly filled with materials of compacted recovery, such as aluminum cans and plastic bottles, sandwiched between two transparent screens. With its alternation of solids and voids, modulated according to the fronts, exposure and view of the same, the envelope helps to create the closure towards the street front but at the same time transparency where visual communication between the spaces is sought.
The surrounding conditions therefore give shape to the actual building: its location close to a fast-flowing road and the direct proximity to buildings of another nature, first of all the shed under construction, so requires masking. The generating element is represented by the surface, with a curvilinear course and convex shape, which shields the affected lots from the ring road and crosses the whole area, hiding the shed from the view from the road. In correspondence with lot 3, two other surfaces are added to the first surface: with a curvilinear course and concave shape, of the same material as the first, which, in tending towards it without ever touching it, create paths, spaces and volumes.



Building envelope and brand communication
The exceptional position of the intervention along the ring road requires a unitary form capable of interacting with the dynamic dimension of traffic in motion but at the same time allows the attention of the potential user to be captured in order to convey the objectives of representation and identity of the Vergero Group.
The project aims to disseminate the activity of the Company – specialized in the collection, selection and recovery of waste – and its commitment in the field of environmental services through an architectural envelope in which the communicative message becomes the character of the building. In fact, the skin of the building consists of the assembly of waste products (plastic and aluminum) derived from different production sectors that the Group deals with, allowing the building to become a building-product.
Everything, like energy and matter, is transformed, acquires new value, new identity.
Even the logo and company name become typographical signs on the architectural surface thus allowing the envelope to be transformed into a graphic project as a further element of recognisability of the Vergero Group.
The architectural façade is a reference to what happens inside and becomes in effect a support for the communication of the brand identity, a three-dimensional business card capable of propagating its image beyond the space that surrounds it.



Vegetation and Architecture
The landscape project developed jointly with that of the building, as it should be. The soft lines of the architecture are crossed by those of the vegetation system, which from Corso Cuneo lead right into the volume, defining the spatiality enclosed between the “membranes”. The trees provided have two scales of size to refer to the relationship that is determined between the large foliage and the people who pass under them or under which they stop, and to that one instead lives with small trees, in which the perceptual relationship with the foliage is closer. The tall trees expected are maples (Acer campestre) and hornbeams (Carpinus betulus) while the smaller ones are flowering apple trees (Malus floribunda).
The lines of the hedges, transversal to the road, are made with mainly evergreen plants, the common barberries (Berberis vulgaris), hollies (Ilex aquifolium) and box trees (Buxus sempervirens), to which are added the evonyms (Euonymus europaea) as deciduous species . Therefore, a prevalence of evergreen species for the hedges is associated with the trees that tell the passing of the seasons with the showy blossoming of apple trees in spring, their autumn color change together with that of hornbeams and maples.


Other elements of the landscape exceed the limits determined by the membranes. The large pool of water, for example, from the courtyard reaches the canal near the road, reflecting and duplicating the surface of the membrane itself. In the same way, the surfaces of perennial and bulbous herbaceous plants, with liriope (Liriope muscari) and iris (Iris japonica), following the sinuous lines drawn by the architecture, articulate the connecting space between inside and outside.
Here you can find groups of rose bushes (Rosa gallica Complicata), with blooming colors similar to that of apple trees. This area enlivened by small reliefs, which indifferently cross the walls of the building, with its paths leads to the external courtyard, up to the paved area that surrounds the stretch of water. Along the same walls made up of cylinders, tall climbers of pink clematis (Clematis armandii ‘Apple Blossom’) will be planted.
On the third level, the roof garden is characterized by the same perennial herbaceous species, among which sinuously winding paths and places of relaxation; also in this space we find the evergreen creepers of clematis that grow leaning against the structure of the walls that characterize the project.