2 Meeting - SSIC PROFESSIONAL TRAINING CENTRE

GORDOLA, switzerland

The project stems from the client’s primary need to protect the professional training workshops from flooding by Lake Maggiore. Durisch+Noll were the only participants in the competition not to design the new building on an embankment, but on a suspended concrete platform. This solution offered substantial advantages in urban and functional terms: the parking and storage spaces for inert materials could be located under the platform, with the spatial flow of the site uninterrupted by construction. The new structure completes the existing complex, transforming it into a training campus for the building trades, and defines the boundary between the campus and the landscape. The programme is fully embodied in a single industrial building: a simple structure generated by the serial repetition of a few simple elements, repeated in a regular form. The building typology is characterized by a concrete platform on which the factory shed is arranged like a precision piece carefully fabricated on a work bench.