Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) has revealed its scheme for a community village on a hillside site near the city of Porto, to host the headquarters for the global technology platform, Farfetch.
© Lucian R, courtesy of BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group
Dubbed ‘Fuse Valley’ by the developers, or ‘The Portuguese Silicon Valley’ by many others, BIG’s project will be located 7 kilometers from Porto’s city center and covers an area of 178,000 square meters.
To curate this scheme, BIG collaborated with the British-Portuguese luxury fashion retail platform Farfetch and the real estate developer Castro Group. The latter’s headquarters will occupy 12 interconnected buildings out of the 24 buildings within the community village. Farfetch HQ is expected to start construction early in 2023 and open in 2025 as part of Fuse Valley.
The 24 buildings within Fuse Valley are home to various tech companies, startups, and services. In its design, BIG gave priority to creating a sense of a community—it aimed to strengthen the connection between the indoors and the outdoors, creating plazas, parks, courtyards, terraces, and landscaped roofs. These nodes are accessible through natural paths that go up and down following the natural contour of the hillside.
© Lucian R, courtesy of BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group
“Rather than a corporate office complex, Farfetch’s future home in Fuse Valley will be a lively urban ensemble bringing every curator, creator, customer, and collaborator together in the most innovative new neighborhood of the city. The urban fabric will allow Fuse Valley to grow and expand organically, like a natural village.” -Bjarke Ingels, Founder and Creative Director of BIG
One of the highlighting features of Fuse Valley is the “Urban Alley”. The Urban Alley is a covered central passage that divides the site running from east to west—from the street to the river. This central promenade will host, across the ground level of its length, public functions including lobbies, an auditorium, and commercial spaces.
Moreover, the facades of the buildings will have setbacks at the ground level to create welcoming canopies, and the corners will be chamfered creating archways and openings to connect courtyards. All these interventions will form a continuous and accessible public realm.
© Lucian R, courtesy of BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group
“Fuse Valley is the perfect interpretation of our golden rule, applied to all our projects: location, innovation, sustainability, and technology. What we are going to do in Matosinhos is something unique and that puts this space on the international map of what is best done both in terms of sustainability and in terms of innovation. With this project, we intend to develop a smart city, or in this case, a smart valley.” -Paulo Castro, CEO of Castro Group
For a more custom experience, the interiors of the project are visioned as a biophilic environment, aiming to boost productivity and enhance the wellbeing of the building’s inhabitants. Furthermore, this approach will create varying spatial experiences specific to each function.
© Lucian R, courtesy of BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group
“The individual buildings that constitute the various elements of the organization are connected to form large contiguous work environments – physically consolidated, but spatially varied to create a human-scale experience,” -Joao Albuquerque, BIG Partner in Charge
The extra ceiling heights and open mezzanines created by BIG’s sloping roofs are the defining features of the atelier-like attics within Fuse Valley. These features enhance the visual clarity and physical connectivity across all floors.
© Lucian R, courtesy of BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group
“We are very excited about this project and the vision that Bjarke Ingels has presented to us, not only because of what it will mean as a milestone for the company, for our people, but also for the community. This project will be a revolution on the current concepts of workspaces, marked by its futuristic nature, by the orientation towards sustainability and wellbeing. It will be a space not only for Farfetch but for the entire community.” -José Neves, Farfetch Founder, CEO and Chairman
BIG has also recently officially started construction on CityWave, its new-generation office building in Milan’s CityLife district, shortly after revealing rendered images of its masterplan for “Telosa”; a city visioned to be the most sustainable city in the world
