Faema Factory

What: former industrial area conversion 
Who: Micamoca srl
Where: Milan - Italy
When: 2000 - 2003
AREA: 30.000 sq. m
AREA49: Marilena Magalotti | m&a_mutti&architetti

The renovation project of the ex-Faema industrial area (a coffee machine manufacturer), involves a core of warehouses and buildings on a total area of 20,000 square meters and was aimed at reviving an abandoned factory, transforming it into an active neighborhood and restoring it to the city.

The pre-existing space is respected: the volumes of the factory are maintained in their main shapes, but by segmenting them and removing some parts, light, air and green spaces are brought into the new rooms. Terraces, patios and courtyards make the new usage possible; industrial places far from the traditional building become domestic.
The idea of protecting this fragment of the Milanese suburbs is combined with that of operating according to logics linked to ecology and the environment.

Preserving structures and facades, exploiting the existing wells to power the air conditioning systems, choosing building materials normally of industrial type to compress the building process are choices that have contained the costs of intervention, also answering to the increasingly differentiated real estate demand of the evolving city.
In order to experiment and while preserving the pre-existing fabric, some industrial components have been naturalized: corrugated fibre cement for the new spaces on the roofs; polycarbonate for the luminous space of the porter's lodge; greenhouses and staircases; thin sheets of galvanized iron for the technical spaces; cut multilayer wood panels for the facade coating; double sheets of u-glass to close the sectioned sections; railway crossbars, also abandoned and reclaimed, for the floors and as bollards.