BIG won the competition for the design of San Pellegrino's new headquarters and soft drinks bottling plant. Bjarke Ingels's team toured the workshops of MVRDV and Snøhetta, as well as Italian architect Michele De Lucchi.
The 17,000 m2 complex will replace an existing plant in the commune of San Pellegrino Terme (province of Bergamo). The famous mineral water has been bottled there since 1899. The preliminary budget of the project is 90 million euros.
When developing the concept, the authors turned to the traditions of Italian classicism and rationalism. It was as if they “reinvented” the key elements of Italian architecture: the arcade, the square, the portico. “The result is a structure where production and the final product, nature and architecture, external and internal, preparation and pleasure itself coexist in a complex,” a San Pellegrino representative commented on the result of BIG's work.
“Instead of imposing a new identity on the existing building, we decided to grow it out of the old context,” Bjarke Ingels explained the essence of the concept. "We also suggest washing away the familiar separation between the front and back of the house to create a sense of continuity."
The construction of the new complex will begin in 2018 and will take place in four stages. First of all, there will be a bridge that will connect the plant with the commune of Zogno - this is where the parking lot for trucks is located. In addition, office space, the north wing of the factory and an experimental laboratory will also be built in 2018, where visitors can see how the San Pellegrino mineral water is produced. The commune's mayor, Vittorio Milesi, hopes that the facility will attract tourists to the area and help bring other projects out of stagnation, the implementation of which has been suspended due to the economic crisis.
