Designed and built by In-Site, a multifaceted Milanese architecture and engineering firm, the new headquarters of IDS & Unitelm opens in the heart of Padua, in Villa Tron: a microcosm of Italian history and art that brings the man of the new digital humanism back to the center.

The new headquarters of IDS&Unitelm, signed by In-Site, a Milan-based integrated architecture and engineering firm specializing in the design and implementation of complex technological infrastructures, is now operational. The offices are located inside Villa Tron, a 16th-century building on Via Orto Botanico, in the heart of Padua. On two floors, three centuries: 16th-century architecture, 17th-century frescoes, wall paintings and 18th-century decorations. And now In-Site's respectful and complex renovation.

After the design of the futuristic Data Center inside a deconsecrated church Padua and following the realization of the Data Center in Rome inside the Service Center of the Episcopal Conference, the synergy between IDS&Unitelm and In-Site continues, a relationship between Client and Designer inspired by the revolutionary vision of Adriano Olivetti in which innovation, technology, aesthetic culture and design are indispensable values for the development and success of a company.

Architects, engineers and experts in environmental psychology conceived solutions capable of giving life to a work environment that was both contemporary and innovative, while set within a microcosm of history and art that imposed strict measures of respect and preservation of the existing, but at the same time offered the possibility of combining technology with the “Aristotelian” soul of the space, capable of transmitting knowledge and understanding.

The building, among the oldest villas in Padua, has a Baroque-style perspective and decorative apparatus. It has a distributional layout typical of the Venetian patrician house, which includes a longitudinal tripartition of the building with a passing hall, rooms in the side hallways and a central lateral staircase for access to the main floor and the second floor attic. Throughout the palace, where Giotto also seems to have passed through, there are decorations made with stucco reliefs in the Rococo style, inserts in the ceilings, frescoes, symbolic figures, and busts are present in the salon's doorways. Particularly notable is the decorative layout of the first-floor hall, where remarkable frescoes enclosed by large painted frames are examples of decorative balance, composed of various symbolic compositions dating back to the typology of the great decorators of the Venetian 18th century.

The project

The design intuition focuses on the central spaces, large rooms that were once the center of gravity of family or monastic life (the villa also housed a community of Franciscan friars) and now transformed into a “stage” for the relationships and interactions between people in the contemporary work dimension.

Once the needs of the employees were analyzed - In-Site in-house also boasts expertise in environmental and occupational psychology - internal flows were studied in order to organize a hierarchy of environments on the basis of which the entire design corpus was structured, which draws on the interventions of Carlo Scarpa. The intervention focuses on a few barycenters (salons) and a series of satellites (perimeter rooms), which represent the design grid. Therefore, functional and at the same time flexible, scalable and integrable solutions have been developed without any structural intervention or masonry work. Indeed, the fulcrum of the project is a nomadic architectural system composed of mobile metal structures that move freely in space. Handcrafted to In-Site's design, the structures consist of an equipped wall and a hyper-technological engineering artifact in which technological elements, from monitors to wiring, are housed. These islands combine with standard furniture elements such as seating and tables, spontaneously generating unpredictable workstations and scenarios such as training rooms or seminar rooms that, with great foresight, were able to anticipate the new flexibility required by workplaces in a post-pandemic context.

““We found in In-Site a technological partner capable of combining the universe of engineering with that of Design,” said Michele Sturniolo, CEO of IDS&Unitelm.. “We were struck by the enlightened and heterogeneous approach with which it has always interpreted the design of data centers, SOCs, and workplaces, with a humanistic vision that aims to bring back to the center man, the quality of his work and the spaces in which he operates every day. The space designed for our Padua office meets the requirements of modern, agile and collaborative work, with scalable, flexible and functional solutions.”

Pietro Matteo Foglio, CEO & Founder of In-Site, said: ““We are delighted to continue this fantastic journey alongside IDS&Unitelm. The trust that has been renewed in us has allowed us to better express our design vision, which places humans at the center of the technological process. We believe that in order to design places where people spend much of their lives, it is necessary to immerse ourselves in the daily experience of those who live those spaces. We have tried to combine technology and modernity, but also history and well-being, translating all this into an architectural language in which man is at the center.”