Ufficio 3B

illustrarch Editoral Team27 July 20191 Mins read336

Ufficio 3B turns a 23-square-metre warehouse in the historic centre of Sassari, Italy into a compact ground-floor office, a study in how very small spaces can be made to work hard. Designed by Cuccuru Pisano Architettura, the project occupies the ground floor of an 18th century building where the original room had fallen into disuse and degradation. With no fixtures in place, the space had long been exposed to bad weather and intrusions, and over the years it had served varied roles, from a frame store to a magazine shop.

A single 3-metre-wide opening faces the paved alley outside, and the architects treated this threshold as the heart of the concept. Rather than sealing the office off, they designed a diaphanous frame that keeps a direct relationship between private and public space, allowing a visual exchange between the inside and the outside. This kind of permeability is well suited to a dense historic centre, where ground-floor rooms have always knitted domestic and commercial life into the street.

One artifact, many functions

The office is a single 16-square-metre room linked to a small toilet by a short corridor. Both the walls and the vaulted ceiling are built of tuff, the most common building material of the area and a familiar presence across much of Sardinia. The tight dimensions drove the whole strategy. To keep the centre of the room usable, all the amenities are pushed to the walls and gathered into a single concrete artifact that integrates the workstations, bookcases, archives, the sofa and the stairs.

The smooth grey concrete holds a constant height of 80 centimetres around the perimeter, drawing a kind of clean horizon line and setting up a strong contrast with the rough texture of the stone walls. Above the wall-mounted couch sits a light reticular structure, reached by a stepladder and a hatch, which can act as a further workstation. Working within strict limits is one of the defining problems of adaptive reuse, where existing fabric sets the rules and every element has to earn its place. Ufficio 3B answers that challenge by making a single piece of furniture carry the whole programme, so the small room reads as generous rather than cramped.