The reuse of reinforced concrete industrial buildings with nested-building systems. The case of the ex-Tobacco Factory in Verona (1930-65).

The large number of disused industrial buildings requires new strategies, marking a sustainable path for their reuse and re-immission into the market. The nested-building strategy allows a better economic sustainability concerning the refurbishment an the re-use feasibility. The paper presents the first results of a research carried on by ICEA Department (University of Padua). It focused on the refurbishment of XX century industrial buildings built in reinforced concrete. By exploiting the standardization of these industrial buildings, the research focused on modularity and prefabrication to facilitate construction times, flexibility and the reversibility of the intervention. The analysis of the functional, structural and construction types made it possible to identify general intervention criteria which – as the identification of the average spans dimensions – led to two design scenarios of wooden housing modules, following nested-building strategy, which were subsequently tested into a real study case, the former Tabacchi factory in Verona.