FCC Arquitectura Merges Two Felgueiras Factory Sheds into One with a Single Curved Metal Canopy

Most factory expansions in northern Portugal follow a predictable script: buy the lot next door, bolt on another shed, paint everything the same grey and get back to work. Poleva, in Felgueiras, started from the same place. The company had outgrown its building, bought the adjacent one, and asked FCC Arquitectura to turn two structures into a single factory. Neither building was worth much on its own. The architects describe them as several years old, poorly built and of little architectural interest.

What makes Poleva worth your attention is how little the architects needed to change the outcome. There is no demolition, no new landmark volume and no structural heroics. Instead, FCC Arquitectura renovated the exterior, extensively redesigned the interiors and stitched the two buildings together while the machines kept running. The works ran from October 2016 to September 2017 without interrupting production. The result covers 3,372 m² of construction on a 3,133 m² footprint, and it argues persuasively that a modest industrial upgrade can carry a real identity if you concentrate the design effort in a few precise places.

Two Tired Buildings, One Name

The street facade is the clearest statement of the merger. A long run of corrugated metal cladding reads as one continuous surface, and the company name is painted across it at a scale that suits a road, not a pedestrian. Two former buildings disappear behind a single skin and a single word. That is branding, but it is also urbanism of a very practical kind: in an industrial zone where every plot looks alike, legibility from a moving car matters.

We like that the architects did not try to disguise what these buildings are. Corrugated metal is the native material of the Portuguese industrial park, and here it is simply detailed with more care and composed with more discipline. The facade does not pretend to be a museum. It looks like a factory that is well run.

A Three-Metre Radius Does the Heavy Lifting

If you remember one element of Poleva, it will be the entrance canopy. The section drawing gives its curve a three-metre radius, and that single geometry carries the whole project. It peels away from the wall plane and sweeps out over dark stone steps, turning a flat cladding surface into something that reaches toward visitors.

This is economical design in the best sense. One curved element, repeated where the building meets people and vehicles, gives a flat and featureless box a recognisable gesture. The credit list names a dedicated metalwork contractor, Mário Peixoto & Aires, alongside builder Joaquim Luís Teixeira Vieira and engineer António Pinto, which suggests that fabrication precision was taken seriously. A curve like this only works if the joint with the wall is clean, and from the photographs it is.

The Metal Skin Comes Inside

The same curved canopy reappears over the loading bay, a sensible decision that treats the service side as worthy of design. Goods entrances usually get the leftovers of a budget. Here the delivery dock shares the vocabulary of the front door, so the building reads as one coherent object from every approach.

Inside, corrugated grey metal lines a pitched-roof hall lit by small high windows. The interior does not switch to a softer language; it extends the exterior material inward. That continuity keeps the project honest, and it reminds you that this is still an industrial shed, now organised with intent.

A Production Floor Organised for Oversight

The production hall is where the merger has to work functionally, and the moves are clear. Yellow floor markings define circulation and work zones, skylight strips run along the pitched ceiling, and a glazed office cube sits directly on the floor. Management is not hidden upstairs behind a wall; it sits in a transparent box inside the workspace.

A raised walkway with a timber-toned balustrade and integrated edge lighting adds a second vantage point over the floor. It is a small piece of architecture, but it changes how the hall is experienced. You can survey production, guide a client through it or simply move between levels without crossing the working zone. In a renovation carried out around live production, this kind of separation between people moving through and people working was probably as practical during construction as it is now.

Rooms for the People Who Work There

The extensive interior redesign shows most clearly in the support spaces. A glazed door with blinds reflects a timber staircase, a narrow white stairwell opens onto a corridor where a dressed mannequin stands under a wall sconce, and a break room offers wooden bar stools, a high round table and pendant bulbs.

None of this is extravagant, and that is the point. Felgueiras is a town built on manufacturing, and factory interiors there are rarely considered beyond compliance. Warm materials, considered lighting and a break room people might actually want to sit in reflect the brief's stated goal: facilities that match the company's standards of quality and contemporaneity. The mannequin also hints that these corridors double as a showroom route, where the product is presented as carefully as the building.

Plans and Drawings

The two-level floor plan shows the logic of the merger: a long hall with a side annex and an office block at one end, two former buildings resolved into a single working sequence. The canopy section confirms the three-metre radius and documents its layers and fixings, while a cutaway axonometric of a glazed shopfront unit with shelving and a louvred screen points to the retail-facing side of the brief.

The most revealing drawings are the stair studies. Several renders isolate black steel stringers, hollow-section treads, an aluminium landing deck and tubular handrails. It is unusual to see this level of component documentation published for a factory renovation, and it tells you where the architects spent their attention: on the pieces people touch and walk on.

Why This Project Matters

Poleva is a useful counterexample to the assumption that good industrial architecture needs a clean site and a new build. FCC Arquitectura started with two buildings it openly considered mediocre and kept them. The investment went into a handful of precise elements, a curved canopy, a unified skin and carefully detailed interiors, rather than into replacing structure that still worked. In an era when demolition carries a real carbon and financial cost, that is a strategy more industrial clients should consider.

It also matters that the factory never stopped. Renovating around live production forces a design to be phased, modular and pragmatic, and those constraints show in the project's restraint. For architects working in Portugal's dense manufacturing belts, Poleva offers a practical model: accept the shed, sharpen its edges and give the people inside rooms worth occupying.

Poleva by FCC Arquitectura, Felgueiras, Portugal. Area: 3,372 m². Completed 2017. Photography by Bruno Barbosa.

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