Factory

Anahita factory project, right, is a symbol of the critical projects of ShahrA Shahr Architecture Office. The fact that society is used to a type of architecture in the context of industrial towns and reacts when faced with different behavior, this reaction is constructive from our point of view.

Spanning many years, the collaboration between Holmøy Maritime and Snøhetta ​includes the design of the company’s administration premises and several industrial buildings constructed in the period between 2014-2021. The new facility is located on the neighboring site at Liland outside Sortland in Northern Norway, and is characterized by transparency – both with large windows and natural light into the production halls, but also between the visitor and the production line at the facility. Seawater is used to heat and cool the building, in combination with a heat exchanger and heat pump. Filtered seawater is also used in production, and several kilometers of seawater pipelines have been laid in the fjord just outside the plant.

Dotted with cornflowers and poppies, the high embankment hides the building from the view of those arriving from the main road to the south; hidden by the grassy and flowery carpet, the spaces develop mainly inside it. It is the context, here, that dictates the conditions: a settlement situation very common in the Veneto plain and characterized by the mixture of houses and warehouses. Located on the built-up edge of a small town in the province of Venice (Fossalta di Piave), the lot is confronted with the presence of an industrial area and a low-density residential fabric, with a prevalence of single-family homes and patches of urban countryside punctuated by the presence of vines.

Furukawa Manufacturing has been creating production systems for automobile parts and other items in Ota City, Gunma Prefecture, one of the oldest factory zones for the automobile industry. To coincide with the new construction of a factory zone in the city, the company decided to build a new headquarters and a factory for automobile production lines.

<<If I had to build here for myself, I think I would build in glass because all the views are so beautiful that it is difficult to decide which view would be preferable>> Mr. Mies talking about the Farnsworth House documented in the Ludwig Mies Critical Bibliography Van Der Rohe.