The new Prada headquarter recovers a degraded territory and mitigates the landscape impact of the planned construction through green spaces and stretches of water

 

ETHIC AND LABOUR

The new industrial plant has been presented in Valvigna, in the provInce of Arezzo (Tuscany). Including production departments, commercial and administrative offices, collections archives and various technical rooms, it has been designed by Guido Canali.

“With Guido Canali, we developed a ‘common vision’ of how to interpret the factory and its work environment, basing it on three fundamental principles: respect for the workers and their labour, a fully synergistic interpretation of the concept of ‘quality without compromises’; and recognition of the importance of details as an expression of efficiency as well as a work culture – not aesthetics as an end in itself”, affirms Patrizio Bertelli, Prada Group CEO and he adds: “Prada and Guido Canali were precursors of such ethics, cultivating them together over twenty years of collaboration. Both spontaneously introduced these principles at a moment in history in which awareness of these values had not yet been acknowledged as a moral duty.”

The master carpenter, whose portfolio shows many collaborations with the Prada Group for over twenty years, carries on a precise philosophy: the so-called “garden factory”.

NATURE AND SUSTAINABLE EFFICIENCY

The idea is that of an industrial architecture that takes life gradually, in order to respect the natural and structural conditions of the surrounding area and the wellbeing of its workers. The aesthetic research can’t be an end in itself, but has to contribute to the physical equilibrium of the neighborhood and to the psychological one of the coming people.

The green presence is central: many trees have been planted alongside some stretches of water, which create a lush and peaceful environment, favoring the workers’ good mood and so their productivity.

Architect Guido Canali explains: “An architecture that rejects gratuitous gestures and exhibitionism but rather is faithful to a critical rigour of rationalist origin, in its eliminating and allowing to refine. In this way, the fascinating secret gardens, the shady trellises of vitis vinifera, the gleaming ponds do not represent architects’ formal self-indulgence, but rather the respect for the dignity and health – also psychic – of those who, within those walls and those gardens, must work there. And therefore inevitably also toil”

To celebrate the new headquarter and claim the “common vision” of the architect and the Group, the “Guido Canali Architetture per Prada”, a book dedicated to this long collaboration, has been released. Canali indeed is the author of Prada’s plants in Montevarchi (1999) and Montegranaro (2001), and of the new Logistical Pole in Levanella.