Piuarch designs Coulisse’s new logistics center in the Netherlands . An architecture that enhances the identity elements of the local culture and of the company, a global leader in advanced covering solutions for windows

This project focuses on functionality, rationality and a concept of architecture strongly rooted in its location, aspects that have always been Piuarch’s hallmarks, originating from the client’s desire to create an efficient facility capable of responding to the needs of a fast-growing international distribution network, while guaranteeing the well-being and comfort of its staff.

A family-run enterprise with a constant future-oriented outlook, Coulisse is centred on innovation, creativity, quality, sustainability of processes and materials and an exceptionally strong commitment to people, from employees to its community. Firmly connected to its surrounding area and committed to its preservation, the company has involved representatives of the local community, an indispensable resource for Coulisse, from the earliest stages of the project.

It is upon these values that Piuarch’s proposal was created, the first design phase of which, recently unveiled to mark the company’s 30th anniversary, will be part of a development involving the creation of a veritable campus with diversified services and facilities to be used by its employees.

A space that will encompass a 21,800 square metre complex in which three buildings will be constructed that, although designed for different uses, will interconnect with each other and its environs.

The exterior of the buildings will be architecturally clean and rational, where different sized volumes interact and heights are further exalted by the choice of materials.

Revisiting the Dutch tradition of brickwork, with a view to drawing on the local heritage, the upper part of the façade of the building designed to house the traditional warehouse uses brick, a material that is intrinsic to the territory’s history, arranged by alternating solids and voids to give the façade texture. In contrast, the lower building, used for offices, is clad with aluminium panelling to produce a dynamic impact created by the pattern of shadows that change appearance depending on your vantage point.

A project that looks towards the future without ever losing sight of the origins of its setting, and which perfectly illustrates Piuarch’s expertise in creating architecture that emerges from an analysis of the urban, historical, social and cultural context and evolves in relationship and harmony with it.

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Founded in Milan in 1996 by Francesco Fresa, Germàn Fuenmayor, Gino Garbellini and Monica Tricario, Milan-based international Piuarch is a collective of professionals in which diverse backgrounds, identities, and skills meet. Piuarch proposes a contemporary architecture strongly rooted in place, respectful of the planet’s resources of today and of the future, ranging from the design of office buildings, retail, hospitality up to the development of residential complexes and interventions of recovery and regeneration on an urban scale. Primary objective, the design of quality urban contexts and common spaces that, through new concepts of use and functional sharing, propose themselves as places of civil rebirth.  In fact, every Piuarch project moves in the direction of architecture’s most exciting challenge: to improve the city, the lives of its inhabitants and the conditions of living together, while respecting everyone’s diversity. An approach aimed at contemplating some fundamental aspects: comfort and constructiveness, well-being and sustainability. Architecture thus becomes a meaningful place, a new environment that goes beyond functional space, a place of relationships between people and landscapes.