“Haus” Golden Goose Headquarters

Designing buildings to fit into the gaps of our built world, mindful of the need to preserve the historical memory of a place, is part of what being an architect is all about. The distance or closeness created between a new building and the one sitting alongside varies and depends on the cultural importance of the existing architecture, but also on the aims of the new structure. Already in the early 20^th century, art historian Alois Riegl’s The Modern Cult of Monuments (1903) emphasized how the stratified layers of the architecture of the past is one of the ways that the culture of a place gradually comes into being. It is this stratification that perpetuates an awareness among future generations of the persuasive forces of the past. The follow-on from this thesis is that “the new” and “the old” can co-exist in diverse contemporary spaces, for example, when an ancient historic center is restored after the ravages of war, when a historic monument requires renovation, but also when new environments are added to a historic monument, creating a step-change in the domestic landscape.

Many strategies have been devised to determine the right relationship new buildings should have with older neighboring architecture in terms of juxtaposition, amalgamation, and overlap. While on the one hand, the most widely adopted strategy is the complete restoration of an existing building and the return to its former state, on the other, there are those who “build alongside”, opening up possible new interpretations on the original theme. This is the approach adopted by Golden Goose’s team of designers together with the Milan-based practice ML Architettura for the new company headquarters and event space in Marghera, Venice’s industrial port on the mainland coast in front of the historic city. The project brief entailed adaptive reuse of a former factory and new architecture.

While the Modern...

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