A new Eurospar retail building on a compact urban site in Udine, delivered from first sketch to completion. The brief was a standard food retail format on a constrained plot, in a residential quarter where a conventional shed would have been the obvious answer and the wrong one.

The challenge

Food retail runs on tight margins and fixed operational requirements: floor area, circulation, loading, parking, visibility. Architectural ambition has to make the building work better rather than cost more, and it has to survive a retailer's programme and a regional contractor's pricing.

What we did

The supermarket treated not as a generic shed but as a composed piece of local infrastructure. Restrained architectural language and precise massing hold the volume against the surrounding fabric rather than turning away from it. Careful façade work gives a building type that usually presents a blank frontage a recognisable public face, without compromising the servicing, accessibility and internal clarity the format demands.

The result

A functional retail building with presence in its street. Built to programme, operating since 2016, and the clearest early statement of a position the practice now applies at campus scale: infrastructure should be legible to the people who live alongside it, not only efficient for the people who operate it.