Pedevilla Architects Turn a Concrete Factory's Own Product into Its Office Interior

A concrete company renovating its own headquarters faces a peculiar challenge: the building has to sell the product. At Beton Eisack's site in Klausen (Chiusa) in the autonomous province of Bolzano, wedged between the Brenner motorway and an active concrete plant, Pedevilla Architects took on exactly that brief. The original office volume, a levitating cantilevered structure designed in 2002 by Armin Blasbichler and Matthias Rainer, still marks the entrance to the factory. Its grey shell remains untouched. Everything inside, though, has been gutted and rethought around a concept the architects call "from grey to green."

What makes this 1,200 square meter renovation interesting is not just the material palette, though that is striking enough. It is the argument the building makes about concrete itself. Most corporate offices try to soften industrial materials or hide them behind plasterboard. Pedevilla leans the other way entirely, deploying green-pigmented lightweight concrete across walls and ceilings with varying surface textures, pairing it with black steel and glass, and then punching dome-like skylights through the ceiling to let shifting light animate every surface. The result is a workplace that feels simultaneously raw and refined, a showroom that people actually work in.

A Ceiling That Breathes Light

The most immediately arresting element is the perforated concrete ceiling. Cupola-like skylights rise at intervals through the roof slab, their surfaces pierced with a playful pattern of circular openings that admit daylight in shifting constellations. The effect changes throughout the day: sharp dots of sun in the morning, diffuse washes by afternoon. From below, the pyramidal geometry of the skylights frames the sky, turning a utilitarian need for daylighting into something close to ornament.

This is a smart move for a building sitting in the middle of an industrial yard. Rather than relying on perimeter glazing, which would mostly frame trucks and aggregate piles, Pedevilla pulls light from above. The perforations also reduce the visual weight of what would otherwise be a heavy concrete plane pressing down on the offices below.

Green Concrete as Interior Finish

The green pigmentation of the concrete is subtle but unmistakable. It reads less as paint and more as a mineral quality inherent to the material, which is the point. Beton Eisack develops and produces concrete, and the headquarters is meant to demonstrate what that product can do when treated with ambition. Walls shift between smooth, polished surfaces and rougher board-formed textures, sometimes within a single room. The junction visible in close detail, where perforated panels meet a smooth base illuminated by an orange task lamp, reveals the care taken with transitions. Nothing is accidental.

The green-and-black palette could easily become oppressive, but it doesn't. Glass partitions and the two inner courtyards break the mass apart, while the concrete's own variation in texture keeps surfaces from reading as monolithic. The material is doing all the decorative work. There is no applied finish anywhere.

Courtyards as Acoustic and Spatial Relief

Two inner courtyards carved into the floor plate address a practical problem that most office renovations in industrial zones ignore: noise. The Brenner motorway runs adjacent to the site, and the concrete plant itself generates constant sound. These courtyards provide noise-protected outdoor zones for employees while simultaneously flooding the interior with sidelight. The glazed courtyard wall visible in the interior photographs creates a visual connection to a quiet outdoor space without exposing occupants to the acoustic environment of the factory yard.

The corridors connecting office spaces benefit from this dual light strategy. Natural light enters from above through the perforated skylights and laterally through courtyard glazing, meaning that even deep plan areas receive some ambient daylight. The board-formed concrete walls of the corridors, stacked with wire-frame chairs and lit by black track lighting, have a gallery-like quality that elevates the circulation from mere connector to occupied space.

The Spiral Stair as Organizational Spine

Pedevilla reorganized the entire entry sequence around a centrally positioned spiral staircase. In the original 2002 building, the entrance logic was straightforward. The renovation uses the stair as both a physical core and a conceptual anchor, drawing visitors up through the two-floor office layout and establishing a clear hierarchy between the open-plan workspaces, individual offices, meeting rooms, and the new seminar and events space.

The stairwell opening, framed by a freestanding concrete wall and the building's characteristic angled ceiling, is treated with the same material intensity as every other surface. Even the corridor leading to a secondary door, rendered in textured stucco with dappled shadows and punctuated by an oversized orange circular handle, demonstrates the architects' refusal to treat back-of-house spaces as afterthoughts. Every room makes the same argument about concrete's atmospheric potential.

Why This Project Matters

Corporate headquarters for building material companies often fall into one of two traps: either they become sterile showrooms that nobody enjoys working in, or they retreat into conventional office design that says nothing about the company's product. Pedevilla's renovation for Beton Eisack avoids both. The 4,200 cubic meter interior functions convincingly as a workplace, with a mix of open and private offices, proper daylighting, and acoustic protection from a genuinely hostile noise environment. At the same time, every surface, every detail, and every light condition makes a case for concrete as something more than structural necessity.

The decision to leave the 2002 exterior untouched while completely reimagining the interior is a quiet statement about sustainable renovation. The grey shell preserves the brand identity that Beton Eisack has built over two decades. The green interior announces where the company is heading. Completed in 2023, the project demonstrates that adaptive reuse does not require a visible architectural gesture on the outside. Sometimes the most compelling transformation is the one you have to walk inside to discover.

Beton Eisack Headquarters Renovation by Pedevilla Architects, Klausen (Chiusa), Autonomous Province of Bolzano, Italy. 1,200 m², completed 2023. Photography by Gustav Willeit.

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