Part of more extensive plan to redevelop the area, the new Civic Library in Castellanza is housed inside an old industrial building facing onto the river Olona. Together with the outside spaces the entire project acts in the small city like an authentic territorial zip, inevitably bringing together a range of services, not just information but also leisure facilities. So there aren’t just reading and references areas but also conversation and meeting rooms, as well as zone serving no set purposes.
The project leaves the factory structure exactly as it was: the building is a simple flat-roofed brick body on two floors that has been restored by bringing out its distinctive elements: the brick walls, the concrete decorations, the vaulted roof and the inner light pillars.
The new projecting steel bowindows are the elements that characterize the new intervention creating a strong relationship between inside and outside. They replace preexisting fixtures and are now used for communication/exhibition purposes or as simple coloured light –boxes: the windows, infact, are characterized by a lighting that gradually changes its colour. The interiors, ranging from the ground-floor conference and exhibition hall to the spacious top-floor library, are shaped like an archipelago of “functional islands” floating in a free structure and standing out through their contrasting colours and materials.
But, most significantly, they differ in terms of the times, ways and speed with which they are used, because the project took this opportunity to devise a civic centre from a cutting-edge technological viewpoint, gluing everything together along multimedia lines. Hence there is a polycarbonate “tunnel” for quick consultation at a PC, spaces serving for more in-depht uses and purposes, and the study rooms ensuring greater privacy without losing visual contact. All complementary means that are simultaneously present, enveloped by one single space in which interaction and isolation are shaped along softer lines more than physical-distributional layering, making this facility the result of a custom-designed project geared to performance.
