A major hub of contemporary art and creativity will be born in Florence

A major hub of contemporary art and creativity is about to be born in Florence: it is the Manifattura Tabacchi Factory, a project that is part of the transformation of the former Florentine cigar factory, decommissioned in March 2001 after more than seventy years of activity, into a sustainable creativity district. The Factory is intended to be the beating heart of the Manifattura of tomorrow, and will become a cutting-edge creative and productive hub, open to all and connected to the world, with the ambition of being a destination capable of attracting the international community of professionals and creatives who want to work and live in Florence, among culture, fashion, art and crafts. The gates that isolated the factory will be opened and the walls removed to open the new complex to the city and the world, twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week.

The renovation of the Manifattura Tabacchi involved a 250-million-euro investment to rehabilitate the historic industrial area consisting of 16 buildings totaling about 110,000 square meters by 2026. Promoting the project (which organizers say is currently the most important urban redevelopment project in Italy) is the joint venture established in 2016 by the real estate company of the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti Group and PW Real Estate Fund III LP, a fund managed by Aermont Capital. MTDM Manifattura Tabacchi Development Management Srl is the development and project management company managing the entire process. The groundbreaking and construction site were presented today with a digital event open to all, The Factory Show, streamed on Manifattura Tabacchi’s YouTube channel and presented by Francesco Mandelli, actor, director, TV host and musician. This was followed by speeches by Giovanni Manfredi, CEO of Manifattura Tabacchi, Dario Nardella, Mayor of Florence, Alessandro Sorani and Massimiliano Giornetti respectively Vice President and newly appointed Director of Polimoda, Roberta Pasinetti, Head of Project Management Manifattura Tabacchi.

The Manifattura from above

Rendering of the new Manifattura

The project in detail

The Factory development involves an investment of 30 million euros and affects a total area of more than 21,000 square meters, and in particular buildings 4, 5 and 11 of Manifattura Tabacchi, originally used for the production of cigars and cigarettes. The architectural design is signed by the Florentine firm Q-bic of Luca and Marco Baldini, assisted by landscape architect Antonio Perazzi; the execution was entrusted to the firm Setten Genesio, which specializes in the recovery of historic buildings. Building 4 and the specular Building 5 will house, on the second floor, the new executive and co-working spaces; the ground floor, on the other hand, will be dedicated to commercial activities with stores, ateliers and restaurants, configuring itself as a new meeting and exchange center inspired by the workshops that once flourished around the city’s central squares. This will be the new home of Manifattura Tabacchi makers, a stable community of creative people who will enhance the art of making (from tailoring to ceramics, from hats to restoration) while innovating tradition.

At the center of the Factory, Building 11 will house NAM-Not a Museum, a place dedicated to production, research and experimentation for contemporary arts. On the roof of the building, on the other hand, will be born Officina Botanica, a roof garden open to the public, designed by landscape architect Antonio Perazzi, with more than 100 trees and 1,300 shrubs, perennials and grasses. The green project focuses on the ability of plants to improve the environment and proposes a scientific and cultural meeting of mutual understanding between plants and humans, symbolically contributing to reducing CO2 emissions and improving air quality, for sustainable, flexible and low-energy development in line with the principle of regeneration, not only culturally and architecturally, but also environmentally.

The Factory will be bordered by two pedestrian streets: “Maker Street,” on which laboratories and workshops will overlook, displaying their artifacts; and the Boulevard, the new pedestrian and bicycle passageway that will cross Manifattura from north to south, connecting the Novoli university district with Cascine Park at the stop of the new T4 tramway. The rehabilitation of the Factory is part of Manifattura Tabacchi’s broader master plan, which calls for an articulated functional mix of recovered original buildings and new construction. The plan was developed by world-renowned designers: with an original and sensitive approach, Sanaa (2010 Pritzker Prize winner) in collaboration with Studio Mumbai developed the meticulous functional program initially proposed by Concrete Architectural Associates. Masterplan development was then entrusted to Q-bic, Studio Antonio Perazzi, and award-winning Piuarch for new construction. The progress of the construction site and the commissioning of the temporary spaces marked the beginning of an ongoing dialogue with the Superintendence of Cultural Heritage of Florence and international experts in restoration and conservation, green design and environmental sustainability.

The development project will then continue with the redevelopment of building 10, located in the area of the new southern access: the former heating plant of the Manifattura Tabacchi will become a brewery, designed as a place for the production and tasting of craft beer. On the other hand, Building 12, north of the central core of the Factory, will offer Manifattura’s first residential product: the Q-bic project includes workshops for artists and designers on the ground floor and industrial-inspired lofts on the first floor that reinterpret the traditional “doorway and workshop” concept with contemporary taste. In tomorrow’s Manifattura Tabacchi another landmark for the community will be the Piazza dell’Orologio, a public space for contemporary events and installations, where Polimoda’s Building 6, Building 7, which will be converted into residential lofts designed by Patricia Urquiola, and Building 8, which will house offices and residences designed by Quincoces-Dragò & Partners, will face each other.

Rendering of the new Manifattura

Rendering of the new Manifattura

Rendering of the new Manifattura

The transformation of Manifattura Tabacchi

Since 2018, Manifattura Tabacchi has been promoting an intensive program of temporary activities on 12,570 square meters of indoor and outdoor areas, specially renovated spaces awaiting their final destination, which have already welcomed more than 260,000 visitors between 2018 and 2020. A refurbished temporary space of about 1,000 square meters on the ground floor of Building 7 and equipped with five laboratory classrooms for lessons in graphic design, photography, set design and painting hosts more than one hundred students and part of the teaching activities of the Florence Academy of Fine Arts. Thanks to the agreement with Manifattura Tabacchi signed in 2020, the institute has moved from its original location for the first time, leaving the historic center. Since December 2019, the team of DogHead Animation, a 2d animation start-up at the forefront of computer graphics animation, part of ForFun Media, a network that gathers the best Italian skills in production for animation cinema and 2d and 3d services, has moved into the spaces on the second floor of Building 8. The spaces on the second floor of Building 8 from March 2020 will also house the LVMH Institute of Crafts of Excellence (IME), a vocational training program aimed at teaching the LVMH group’s savoir-faire in the crafts, creation and sales trades to the younger generation.

Among the individuals who have already installed themselves in Manifattura’s spaces are Baba Ceramics, Bulli&Balene, Canificio, Duccio Maria Gambi, Mani del Sud, Mòno, Stefano Mancuso - PNAT, SuperDuper, and Todo Modo. The number of people currently working in Manifattura, which has grown steadily since its reopening in 2018, has reached more than 1,000 professionals, students, and workers who attend and work daily in the transforming complex.

The redevelopment project of the former Manifattura Tabacchi focuses everything on sustainability, minimizing demolition, and making the original buildings more efficient and sustainable with geothermal energy and active management of the water resource. Particular attention is paid to the design of the greenery, entrusted to landscape architect Antonio Perazzi and intended as a sustainable regeneration device “based on the presence of pioneer and generous vegetation capable of transforming the landscape currently characterized by its mineral appearance and lack of draining surfaces.” The green design includes interventions ranging from the planting of more than 1,000 trees to the laying of paving with wide joints to allow for the growth of plant species and soil drainage, from the creation of vertical plant surfaces on the facades of buildings that improve their energy efficiency to the establishment of a roof garden that enhances the area’s pioneer plant species. Trees, plants and green areas will reproduce on a large scale the filtering and absorbing action of carbon dioxide and air pollutants that is already taking place in the “Air Factory,” currently present in the temporary spaces of B9. In this experimental installation created by neuroscientist Stefano Mancuso with PNAT, a multidisciplinary think tank and design company co-founded by professr Mancuso, air is filtered of airborne pollutants, re-circulated and constantly monitored.

The Manifattura Tabacchi will then be connected to the center with tramway line T4 (currently in the executive design phase). Internal mobility, on the other hand, is designed to return Manifattura Tabacchi to the life of the neighborhood and of Florence through sustainable and integrated usability with low environmental impact means: tramway, bicycles and ecological cars. The new Manifattura Tabacchi will be an open, permeable place without boundary walls, enhanced through a distributive system of green areas, squares and public spaces for social relations, where the community will be able to contribute to create the new identity of the places. The historic monumental entrance on Via delle Cascine will be joined by various pedestrian and bicycle access points, as well as controlled driveway entrances and a dedicated stop for the new tramway line 4.

The statements

“The Manifattura Tabacchi in Florence,” says Marco Doglio, chief real estate officer of Cassa Depositi e Prestiti, “is an example of urban regeneration of an architecturally iconic complex that will want to distinguish itself in the future by dedicating its spaces to new content such as design, art and culture, more adherent to the demands of young people in particular, testifying to the great attention to sustainability that there is in our Group. We are very pleased with the final handover of the Manifattura’s first building, number 6, to house the third city headquarters of Polimoda and confident about the start of the commercialization of new parts of the complex, which will definitively return the complex to the city to house the new functions.”

“Polimoda in Manifattura Tabacchi has found its third home,” said Polimoda President Ferruccio Ferragamo. “Together with Villa Favard in the heart of Florence and the Design Lab in the Made in Italy district in Scandicci, this facility with its nearly seven thousand square meters of laboratories makes our school a unique excellence in the world of fashion education. We are also proud to have contributed with this important investment to the rebirth of an entire neighborhood in Florence. From the very beginning we believed in this beautiful urban regeneration project for the city, initiated by the joint venture between the Cassa Depositi e Prestiti Group and the PW Real Estate Fund III LP investment fund headed by Aermont: an extraordinary architectural heritage that will soon become a state-of-the-art neighborhood, a living and usable space for all citizens.”

“We are honored to have been the first to grasp the importance and potential of the former Manifattura Tabacchi space,” added Alessandro Sorani, vice president of the school. “A place that for us is not only an educational place, but is a symbol of beauty and rebirth that continues to evolve also thanks to the presence of creative realities like the one in which our students live.”

“The beginning of the work of Manifattura’s FACTORY is a very important and symbolic moment of change, for us it represents the transition from ’thinking’ to ’doing,’” emphasizes Giovanni Manfredi, CEO Manifattura di Tabacchi. “The soul of the project is to rediscover the contemporary part of Florence, offering a ’fresher’ dimension, a place where it is possible to experiment, make mistakes, be innovative.”

A major hub of contemporary art and creativity will be born in Florence

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