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The iGuzzini Illuminazione office complex is situated in parkland in the midst of an area of the greatest archaeologicalinterest and natural beauty, in which the remote past blends magically with the everyday reality of work and a future full of promise.
The area has been continuously inhabited since the third millennium B.C., since the Copper Age, which gave rise to one of the most ancient of Italic civilizations. This was a pastoral, warlike culture which made the transition to stable agriculturalism with the introductuion of the four-wheeled ox-cart and the plough, thus setting the limits within which life would be lived here for thousands of years.

Indeed, this way of life has changed only recently, within the last fifty years, but with an energy which has transformed the Marche, and above all recanati, into one of the most productive areas of Italy, from the individual artisan to fully fledged industries.
In designing and building the technical and head office buildings, and redesigning the manufacturing units, we could not but take into account such a dense substrate of memory and culture. Similarly, the innate tendency of architectural design to autonomy and independence had to be sublimated in an organic relationship with the surrounding countryside.

These restraints were made part of the project itself, rather than acting as external limitations to the design (indeed, they became its defining characteristics), so that the project draws sustenance from the landscape and the collective memory of generations; the service area and the setting of the complex, for example, have been integrated into the parkland, thus revitalising an extensive area which had been abandoned to chance and disuse.
This is an environmental architecture, in the sense of a vital and yet discrete engagement with the past and the spirit of place which live on in the trees and hills of Recanati.
(taken from "Nature & Artifice, The iGuzzini Site at Recanati", by Anty Pansera)