Zermeghedo is a small town in the province of Vicenza. A town that symbolises the industrial development of the Veneto region in the ‘80s, so much so as to have been a study-case for the Washington Post for its economic, social, and financial concentration. In 1984 this explained the Northeast. Today the town council has decided to redesign its industrial area with its Fattore K, made by Fuoribiennale, redevelopment plan which has projected and built services in the industrial area (from football fields to a restaurant), a biomass cogeneration plant, as well as including new structural-aesthetic ideas entrusted the A12 group, one of Italy’s artistic-architectural reference points, and to the Aua studio. The result has been a manual of “environmental and landscape improvement” for re-planning the industrial area, one in which such symbolic elements as strata and hills offer new techniques for recuperation.

The plan
The Fattore K, the K Factor, plan for Zermeghedo is, above all, a rethinking of the rules for constructing the landscape (which in this case is quite artificial) and an attempt to invent a logic that might be able to give a new meaning to the whole territory rather than particular individual interventions. The characteristics of the Vicenza territory, with its alternation of old villages, large industrial zones, and agricultural areas, have led to an approach aimed at defining interventions for change which might be repeatable and extendible to other territories with the same characteristics.
Concretely, this has taken the form of an abacus of possible interventions, one to be thought of as an alphabet of physical elements to be arranged on the territory using a grammar of applicative modes which might be adapted to the specific characteristics of each place. On the basis of this document we have developed the first phase of amplification of the industrial area, one which aims at the realisation of a zone for environmental improvement and interventions for the restoration of the hydraulic safety conditions, with the specific aim of giving a new and forceful identity to an urban periphery which is currently considered as a no-mans land.