Italmark shopping centre in Castel Goffredo (MN)
Project type
Strategically located between the historic town centre, the school campus, the swimming centre and the new residential districts, the new Italmark shopping centre in Castel Goffredo has all the architectural and urban features of a true centre of aggregation.
The architectural project by studio Rodighiero associati of Castiglione delle Stiviere incorporating 20,000 square metres of retail space, 3,400 square metres of indoor malls and 615 parking spots, including 290 indoor spots, faced the challenge of reducing the shopping centres impact on the city by integrating it into the historic, economic and social context of the city of Mantua.
The volume of the building consists of a simple parallelepiped shape covered with prefabricated panels.
In the middle of each panel is a porcelain stoneware tile in Sodalite Blu from GranitiFiandres New Marmi collection: a surface that maintains the colour and veins of original quarried marble and combines them with the technological properties of porcelain stoneware, perfect for outdoor cladding. The effect is that of a decorated façade permitting unitary perception of architectural volumes.
Blue and red characterise the design of the building's interior finishes.
Blue is used to identify the horizontal routes along which the public walks and is also the colour of the glass dome with its free views of the sky. Red, the Italmark corporate colour, makes the shopping centre recognisable as belonging to the chain and identifies vertical links in the building.
The perfection of the circular cutting of GranitiFiandre Sodalite Blu ceramics in the floors is a result of water jet cutting technology. Careful cutting and laying creates circular inserts in the floor which recall the circular glass dome and reinforce the idea of the piazza.
The flooring is completed with GranitiFiandre Castel (from the Geologica-New Stone collection), Dolomiti (Geotecnica-Graniti collection) and Grey Ground tiles (Geologica-New Ground collection for interiors).
A detail of particular aesthetic and technical importance is the gap
between the tiles, which continues as if made out of the same material as the tiles.
The false ceilings also include a symbolic reference to the circle with blue LED lighting.
The most characteristic feature of this project by Rodighiero associati of Castiglione delle Stiviere is the glass dome and gallery in the public pedestrian routes.
The dome covers a true covered piazza, a return to the ancient concept of the agorà: a place where people can meet, talk and do business.
The gallery 'cuts across the volume diagonally, giving the building a strong dynamism based on profound formal simplification.Students can walk from the school to the swimming centre through the gallery, a public axis linking different spaces. The parking lots, on three levels connected by ramps, also contribute to this strategy of linking the shopping centre with its urban context, offering different ways of accessing the centre and making different parts of this multipurpose building on four levels independent and autonomous.
The project makes a special effort to reduce environmental impact with energy-saving technologies such as heating systems set to a low temperature, use of insulating ventilated buffer walls and control of the exposure of glass surfaces to the sun.
Photos by Annalisa Pividori
SHARE THIS
