Architecture in Italy: Bjarke Ingles Group to design San Pellergrino’s headquarters in Terme
New York and Copenhagen’s Bjarke Ingels group to design San Pellegrino’s flagship factory in Italy.
Known best for their Iconic green glass bottles, San Pellegrino is getting a facelift! The Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), founded in Copenhagen in 2005, has won an international competition to build the flagship factory for 118-year-old sparkling water company San Pellegrino. The win was announced at an event held in the Herzog & de Meuron-designed Feltrinelli Foundation in Milan this week. BIG beat out the firms MVRDV (Netherlands), Snøhetta (Norway) and Architetto Michele De Lucchi (Italy), each of whom presented their proposals last October. According to BIG, they look forward to collaborating with San Pellegrino and local architects Studio Verticle over the next 4 years, with construction slated for conception in 2018.
A nod to Italian architectural design, the €90 million project will rebuild and extend the original plant, where water has been bottled since 1899 in the northern Italian alpine town of Terme. San Pellegrino’s new HQ will become a 17,500 square meter facility, with arches serving as its thematic through-line articulated as vaults, arcades, and pergolas. BIG’s winning design was inspired by the local landscape of the adjacent Brembo River, notably by the waterway’s seamless flow.
In addition to the factory production, visitors will be able to learn about company’s history and functionality on site, with a giant geological sample at the center. The San Pellegrino Experience Lab will enable visitors to follow the process of how mineral water is produced.
Bjarke Ingels and his firm recently starred in an episode of “Abstract: The Art of Design” — an eight-part Netflix documentary series featuring various innovators and creatives that went live on February 10. The firm’s portfolio includes such projects as a power plant with a ski slope on its roof in Copenhagen, London’s Serpentine Gallery Pavilion in 2016, the Two World Trade Center tower in New York and a design for the Hyperloop high-speed transportation system in Dubai.
Ingels’ firm was also selected by the Nordic Council of Ministers to help build a new collective brand identity for the Nordic region — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Greenland, the Faroe Islands, and the Åland Islands.