Fabrica

Luciano Benetton and Oliviero Toscani conceived Fabrica in 1994 as a research centre for contemporary communication, set up at Catena di Villorba, 12 kilometres from Treviso. Its home is Villa Pastega Manera, a 17th-century building flanked by two other buildings and a small chapel, which Tadao Ando restored and significantly enlarged.

Ando's project runs from 1992 to 2000. The work covered repairing and refurbishing the existing buildings, with local craftsmen closely involved from the outset; most of the new buildings lie underground.

The complex covers 51,000 m2. It is organised around two complementary poles, the existing building and the new intervention: the historic villa, "full", and the new sunken elliptical piazza, "empty". The new part, in concrete and glass, is almost entirely underground, to bring out the surrounding landscape. The floor area is 5,172 m2, of which 1,769 m2 is renovation and 3,403 m2 extension.

The villa was restored using traditional construction techniques, with plasters, marmorino and Palladian-style floors. Its atrium, redesigned as a double-height ellipse, echoes the shape of the sunken piazza. In front of the villa, in the century-old park, a line of free-standing columns crowned with truncated-cone capitals marks the path through the reflecting pools of the courtyard. The Pastega family's private chapel, which faces the colonnade and the reflecting pools, has been carefully restored and keeps its stuccoes and frescoes.

The elliptical piazza, 220 m2, is the pivot of the new building, "rooted" below ground level to leave the surrounding landscape intact. Columns and glazing line its perimeter, and it is reached by a monumental staircase. The rooms around it keep a continuous visual link with it through large windows.

Underground, the library takes the form of a spiral sinking little by little into the earth, with light from above; it covers 130 m2 and holds more than 10,000 volumes. The cinema is next to the library, the photography studio next to the cinema. In one of the two buildings flanking the villa, between it and the underground part, the auditorium looks onto the reflecting pools; the Imago Mundi room, named after Luciano Benetton's contemporary art collection, faces the colonnade and the reflecting pools on one side and the patio next to the elliptical piazza on the other.

Tadao Ando says of Fabrica: “a space that stimulates communication and encounters between people, history and nature”.

From 1994 to 2024, Fabrica hosted young creatives from around the world. In its final years, every six months, a selected group aged 25 or under followed a path of training and research in photography, visual communication, interaction design, video, writing, music and other fields, and each could carry out a project presented at the end of the residency. Its method was "learning by doing", inspired by the Renaissance workshop; it saw itself not as a school, an advertising agency or a university, but as a cultural centre and an incubator of talent.

As part of the Benetton group's restructuring, these activities were suspended in early 2025, to turn Fabrica towards education.

The spaces can be visited at public events or for academic purposes; enquiries go to press@fabrica.it.

The centre is at Via Postioma 54/F, Catena di Villorba, 12 kilometres from Treviso, from where a bus line runs there; by car, leave the A27 motorway at Treviso Nord.