the concrete marchino furnace

The Factory  was built in the early twentieth century and remained in operation for the firing of marl and the production of cement from 1911 to the mid-1930s.

After several lives, it was partly recovered with European funds and made safe in its public part. The remaining complex of buildings and warehouses remain privately owned today.

The Concrete Marchino Factory is a site of experimentation. It’s the place where Manifattura Urbana was born in 2014, in its practical form and then in its thought form; it’s the place where public-private-community-travellers-students-businesses-teachers-curious and volunteers meet for a few weeks a year, every year. It is an open-air construction site always on the move that follows the energies that arrive, transforms them, multiplies them and generates new ones. It is a training space for construction techniques and self-construction with theoretical and practical lessons.

It is the exchange of different knowledge from cultural, technical and scientific to culinary. It is a space that welcomes travellers, those in search of knowledge and making. It is a public space that is slowly recovered through the work of citizens, technicians and students and it is then given back to the community, every year, a little more welcoming and functional and rebuilt. The Ex Fatcory is a common good.