Banco Lariano Grandate

Located in a barycentric position with respect to the main links, the Management Centre of the Banco Lariano is a complex of two and three-storey buildings above ground, located in an area of over thirty thousand square meters in the flat area of Prato Pagano. The building to the south, with a height limit of two floors above ground, includes the areas intended for the management, which overlook a roof garden created on the roof of the underlying auditorium. In addition to the offices, areas designed as small meeting rooms, the boardroom and the executive dining room are particularly refined, all furnished with considerable but sober elegance, according to the instructions of the technical office of the same banking company. Designed to accommodate a thousand employees, it is spread over approximately 135,000 cubic meters of volume, with a modular but articulated design that finds its reference point in the entrance hall, which also serves as a distribution element. The large three-storey building to the north is reserved for the offices, it has a square grid-type structure, which creates large light wells on the inside, which, through continuous strip windows, light up the rooms, designed to guarantee maximum functionality. The basement, in addition to giving space to a series of services, represents a link between the inside and the outside of the building complex as far as the handling of materials is concerned, which therefore does not interfere in any way with the passage of staff on other levels. A centre of this kind, evidently thought out in a dimension of considerable self-sufficiency, can obviously not do without a series of supports. Within the complex, there are, therefore, in addition to the three vaults and a data processing centre, an infirmary, auditorium, pneumatic mail service, a press centre, a canteen and an archive. Of particular interest is the auditorium, which has 220 seats, and the canteen for the staff, a remarkably luminous environment due to the realization of a long wall made entirely of glass bricks. It is important to note that in a complex of these dimensions, the fact that a series of original design solutions allow the use of a kind of modularity that does not degenerate but ends up giving seemingly unrelated and distant elements a perceptible formal coherence.