Venice-based architecture studio AMAA - Collaborative Office For Research And Development has used eight old shipping containers in a factory in Arzignano, Italy to serve for various kinds of purposes. 

Named Space Within a Space, it is a temporary installation, comprised of eight shipping containers, all containers - which are in reddish colors, are placed irregularly in the building.

The architects wanted to activate the space without considering any specific purpose, they designed an "unintentional space". 

"The project is an act of appropriation of a cave in its dimension of unintentional space, a context where the function is absent; a former industrial building characterized by a shed roof accessible through a vaulted hangar," said AMAA. 

"The clear construction is a former factory which, having lost its relationship with its productive function, reveals itself as ruins, where the possibility of colonization is left open."

The project recomposes a new spatiality defined by eight 40 feet (12,19-metre) containers measuring 12x2.4x2.6m arranged and assembled in two levels. 

They considered that the surrounding space will be participating. "The containers become the condition through which the relationship with the existing context is performed," according to the architects. 

By loosing in turn the relationship with their original function, the containers are interpreted as mere irregular volumes arranged in the space.

As the architects highlight, in this project the container is no longer identified as "a container-space", but they act as a structure-space, "which finds indeed in the composition the relationship between archaeology and new insertion." 

"The old is colonized, and the former industrial building appears as a modern cathedral. Having lost the relationship with its most solemn functions, it can be interpreted, again, as a non-intentional space where everything appears for what it is: structure."

Plan of the building

Section

Axonometric drawing 

Project facts

Project name: Space Within a Space

Architects: AMAA - Collaborative Office For Research And Development

Location: Arzignano, Italy

Size: 635m2

Date: 2020

All images © Simone Bossi

> via AMAA