Milan, Italy
Designed by Filippo Pagliani and Michele Rossi of Park Associati in collaboration with interior architects Storagemilano and landscape architect Marco Bay, Luxottica Digital Factory is an avant-garde building created using technologically innovative materials, seeking, and achieving state-of-the-art architectural solutions.
Luxottica Digital Factory has recently been awarded a 2023 International Architecture Award by The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design and The European Centre for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies.
Located in Milan, in the Tortona area, the Digital Factory is the new home to the entire Luxottica production and sales chain from production materials to the retail store.
Refined design and high-end technology—the client’s guiding principles —have been translated into a project based on quality, technological innovation of materials, and on the search for avant-garde architectural solutions.
Park Associati’s project reinterprets the existing industrial building – formerly occupied by General Electric – by maintaining its main volumes and, above all, its character, with contemporary top-quality additions both to the façade and inside.
The intervention emphasizes the building’s original shapes and lines by eliminating any later internal additions and by adapting the building to contemporary safety and sustainability parameters while preserving the excellent reinforced concrete truss design and enhancing the façade’s vertical shape.
The casing is the result of technological and structural research aimed at lending the building the greatest transparency and indoor brightness.
The bold façade overlooking Via Tortona consists of a full-height glazed structure with vertical metal blades that bring to mind the sheds.
Transparency is reflected in the internal spaces that are completely reinterpreted to accommodate the new functions: the showroom and some commercial spaces on the ground floor, and the Digital Lab – a high-tech innovation center – on the first floor.
The interiors are bright and comfortable and benefit from green leisure and informal meeting areas – the internal garden on the ground floor and the green patios on the first floor.
The Digital Factory helps revitalize an area of the city that from the suburban environment is being turned into a vital area, returned to the urban and social fabric.
Project: Luxottica Digital Factory
Architects: Park Associati
Lead Architect: Lorenzo Merloni
Design Team: Filippo Pagliani, Michele Rossi, Michele Versaci, Valeria Donini, Alessandro Bentivegna, Simone Caimi, Ismail Seleit, Marco Vitalini, Cristina Tudela Molino, Luna Pavanello, Sofia Dalmasso, Luca Pazzaglia, Marinella Ferrari, and Mario Frusca
Landscape Architect: Marco Bay
General Contractor: SMV Costruzioni
Client: Luxottica Group SpA
Photographers: Lorenzo Zandri, Andrea Martiradonna, and Nicola Colella – Park Associati
