NEW PARMIGIANO-REGGIANO SEASONING WAREHOUSE "LATTERIA MODERNA"

Bibbiano (Reggio Emilia) 2020-2021

A NEW FORM OF RURALITY.

Parmigiano-Reggiano, with its millenary tradition, is an integral not only economic but also social part of the rural Emilia area. Dairies are fixed points of the landscape of the Reggio and Parma provinces and their communities, representing much more than a simple place of processing.

Naturally alongside the unchanged artisan nature of the product, in the last century new technologies for production and conservation have been developed, which from the postwar period onwards made it necessary to adapt the traditional structures, which were flanked in most of the cases structures conceived only from the utilitarian point of view, favoring coarse solutions with an industrial flavor, not very in tune with the rural environment in which they are inserted.

Starting from these two considerations, the project - while free from landscape regulatory constraints - focused on the synthesis of the two aspects, to combine the necessary functionality with an aesthetic that would do justice to the nobility of the product and to the territory and the community that produces it. The project involved the construction of an automated warehouse for the maturing of the forms, and therefore the priorities were given by the plant itself, having to respect precise limits in terms of logistics and methods of conservation of the stored products. From this an elementary shape was derived, which was then refined to reduce the volumes and their initial monolithicity. The part of the building visible from the road has been buried for a third of the height, creating a slope that connects with the adjacent fields to reduce the visual impact of the surrounding countryside. The envelope was then treated with the most representative and evocative material of the rural building of the area, covering it in brick with the typical mixture of the area and with traditional plastering.

The top part of the building, narrower than the brick "base", was instead covered with deep metal lamellae, painted with a treatment that incorporates the typical uniform patina of rust that characterizes agricultural tools. Their spaced and staggered arrangement helps to perceive the volume as a light body lying on the brick base, also helping to “blend in” in the visual perception from the road with the bush behind it.