The building, planned by Claudio Nardi, stands out in an urban context of the 19th–20th century and it’s located nearby the town center. Its ascended architecture, characterized by achromatic shades, consists of surfaces that seem to run one after the other in an athletic rythm, almost vague and intangible. Instead of concrete or stone we’ve in fact preferred a light material that, mixed with the tenuous colours and the natural light reflected on them, calls to mind a sense of transparent and reassuring uncertainty – an open question rather than a close answer …
The complex framework of the rules that decide upon distances, heights and views, not only has dictated the limit within we had to move, but also has inspired the outline of the new building’s shapes, with its internal yards, its terraces, its loggias and “bridge links”, so transparent that they look as if they were suspended between the two blocks that compose the building. On one hand outwardly slight and solid, on the other hand the inner space of Mandragora, faithfully to the best mediterranean tradition, overlooks remote and bright courtyards. The work places, brighted by the natural light from each angle, are fluid, shared and intimate at one time, everywhere linked through a view to the external green areas.
The building, developed on three floors, one of which out of the ground for the storage room, consists of a work area, offices, hall and garage (ground zero); at the first floor stay the main office and the meetings room. Born on the footprint of an old handcrafted establishment, it preserves its sign, as it should happen for every urban transformation stratified on a prior scar. The balance of Mandragora’s architecture recalls its operational principles: the door made of glass, the empty spaces that open in the inner places, the passages crossed by the light, the vertical movement of the volumes are all “spellings” that talk about transformation and open minds, that’s to say of a research, ours, that turns out to be a dynamic “trying to listen”.