Images, texts and drawings narrate the restoration project of an industrial zone and its conversion to create a center for handcrafting activities.
The intent of the client, who wished to maintain the original productive vocation of the area, established the criteria for the project, leading the designer to ignore contemporary trends and style to focus on a reading of the local area and its history.
Complete demolition being out of the question, Belardi focused on the complex’s evocative potential, developing a design based on three guiding precepts: redesigning what was already there, adding small architectural elements in specific points and creating axial perspectives.
Major aspects of the design included using serial organization, introducing symbolic elements, creating a chromatic identity and a new axial perspective. These factors helped create a new recognizable perception of the complex. The restoration of the existing context joined the village’s image with restored permeability towards the Tiber River.

The monographic volume, is available in a bilingual Italian/English version and features a complete description of the work through photographs and drawings, along with technical summaries and explanatory texts, to assure an accurate reading of the project. The description of the project is introduced by a critic essay by Diego Barbarelli. A section with biographic and bibliographic information, along with a brief summary of the works, provides an overview of the research and design activities conducted by the firm.

Paolo Belardi (Gubbio 1958) graduated with honors in Civil Engineering in Rome in 1982. He is an associate professor at the University of Perugia. Belardi has led conferences and master classes in Bratislava, Hangzhou, London, Oxford, Beijing, Xian, Wuhu and Zagreb. Since January 2013 he has been director of the Pietro Vannucci Academy of Fine Arts in Perugia.
HOFLAB (Paolo Belardi, Simone Bori, Matteo Scoccia and Carl Volckerts), the experimental branch of HOF, is a workshop in which its members’ theoretical research, idea-generating studies and professional experience come together. HOFLAB is involved in architectural design without limits of scale, working on everything from concept to construction, oriented to innovation in building type.