Snøhetta and Park Associati have published photographs showing progress on the refurbishment of the 1960s Pirelli 35 office block in Milan. When completed in 2024, the project seeks to “create a generous and publicly accessible building with a significantly reduced carbon footprint.”

Building on the existing scale and lines of the neighboring buildings, the Pirelli 35 refurbishment will see works to the existing structure complimented by a rooftop addition and a six-story extension. The rooftop volume will create a new penthouse office floor while the extension “intimately addresses the smaller scale of the surrounding residential buildings while also providing chromatic contrast to the sober and elegant re-cladded facade of the existing building.”

The new scheme has been organized in three horizontal “layers.” The ground and 9th floor emphasize transparency to provide a high degree of transparency while levels 1 to 8 provide an “elegant and sober workplace reflecting the architectural language of surrounding office buildings.” The 10th-floor penthouse, hovering above the 9th-floor terrace, creates a “unique meeting point with beautiful views overlooking the city.” Outside, meanwhile, the existing central wing of the building is to be demolished to create a new courtyard at ground level.

The construction update comes one week after Snøhetta's Charlotte Mecklenburg Library officially broke ground in North Carolina, and in the same month that the firm unveiled a master plan to revitalize the site of the second-largest waterfall in the United States. Other recent schemes by the firm include the Blanton New Grounds which recently opened at the University of Texas at Austin, a hexagonal pavement system designed with Asak Miljøstein, and an innovation hub in Bangkok featuring the city’s largest elevated garden.