In spite of being an international fashion company, Benetton still preserves its original headquarters in Treviso, a small town in the northwest of Italy located little more than an hour by car from Venice. On this site the company commissioned the design of an art school for young people to study fashion design and manufacturing.

To preserve the rich artistic and architectural heritage of Treviso, known for its Palladian villas, regulations promote the maintenance and restoration of historic structures. The project brief therefore included the repair and refurbishment of the existing structures in the company’s compound, for which an intense collaboration with local artisans was established from the beginning. Furthermore, most of the new buildings are buried, and one of these structures in particular, the library, is furnished with a helical archive that descends deep underground. This ambitious intervention is thereby set out not as a mere confrontation, but as a sympathetic resonance between old and new – a dialogue over time that aims to stimulate the imagination of the students and connect them to a new creativity...[+]