The Officine Gullo House wins the third edition of the Premio Architettura Toscana

Selected from 140 candidates, the Officine Gullo House project won the Premio Architettura Toscana in the “First Work” section, for the following reasons:

“In the era of the care society, it is significant that a profit-making entity opens the doors of heritage to public enjoyment and does so through urban as well as architectural design choices. The project, in the historic centre of Florence, aims to transform a 15th-century Renaissance chapel into an experimental showroom for a kitchen company, Officine Gullo. The building, part of the Ognissanti church complex, rich in paintings by famous masters such as Giotto, Ghirlandaio and Botticelli, has over the centuries served the most varied functions, from funerary chapel to cinema, from restaurant to night club. The project seeks to return this space to its original simplicity and purity, without removing alterations from the past. With only a few interventions and specific modifications to materials and circulation layout, the project separates what is old from what is new, emphasising the different history of the individual elements. The triangular volume at the centre, added in the 1980s, is freed from its cladding and reveals its structure, declaring its diversity from the original parts of the chapel and offering the opportunity to create a multifunctional, transformable and extremely flexible space. The stairs, meanwhile, are returned to the cavity between the chapel and the church of Ognissanti, originally detached from one another”

It reads in conclusion in the award’s reasons:
“The concept of the showroom is thus reinterpreted, displaying a single active kitchen at the centre of the space. The visit becomes a museum experience, where the visitor, even before getting to know the products, comes into contact with the history of Italian cuisine through antique objects on display and multimedia videos.”

The Premio Architettura Toscana, aimed at works completed in Tuscany within the past five years, was created to stimulate reflection on contemporary architecture and awarded the best projects “that have managed to engage with current times and with a new concept of living and using spaces, where environmental responsibility and the recovery of a distinctly domestic, human-scale character now seem to matter most”.

The award ceremony took place last 15 June at the Palazzina Reale in Piazza Stazione in Florence, home to the Ordine and Fondazione Architetti Firenze.
Following the award, the architects of SuperSpatial commented:

“Having the courage to transform what could have been a traditional showroom into a work that opened itself to the city was a great challenge, both for us and for our client Officine Gullo. We believe that for contemporary architecture it is truly important to think of every project as a dialogue with the city, reinventing the places we live in every day. In this case, a kitchen showroom became for us a place of conviviality. A very particular historic place (a former chapel next to the Ognissanti complex) gave us the opportunity to make the showroom almost a civic centre, a public space, something that could welcome the city inside it through unique events. I hope we succeeded in this and we are very happy that it has been recognised by the award.”

Find out more about the Officine Gullo House, a space unlike any other, where the state of the art of Officine Gullo kitchens meets the great history of the city of Florence