About

Officina Faré, once  home to a family-owned business,  is a space looking for a new lease on life.

The workshop – or Officina – is an open space of 500mq with two annex studios and a terrace on the first floor. It was home to a family-owned business of craftsmen, metal workers, and mechanical engineers who have recently retired.

The workshop is part of a living space that alincludes an old traditional family building – a palazzina – comprising a number of apartments, two offices and a large garden with centenary trees right in the middle of an urban space. This structure organically grew over more than 100 years (the first document notifying the purchase of this place dates back to 1902) from a small dwelling surrounded by an orchard into a living space that has been the home of many families from a variety of cultural backgrounds for more than 70 years.

Turning Point

The space is now at a turning point. The old and new generation have a common vision: transform this space into a productive, creative, and social place, where traditional craftsmanship  meets digital making, advanced technologies, research, and new economic models. The priority, right now is to inject energy into the place by opening it up to like-minded people who value collaboration and freedom of experimentation.

In practice, we wish to open up l’Officina to start-ups, university researchers, community groups, and sports and culture organisations – anyone who can share with us inspiration, curiosity, ideas, and energy.

About The Faré

The Faré is an extended family of makers. Firstly, the generation who built, worked and lived in this place all their lives; then, the families who live on site; finally the wide network of friends who live both locally and abroad.

About the name Faré

I have asked my late father how he would have liked to call his workshop. As a retired craftsman and mechanical engineer, he always worked with metal, and often with ferro (Italian for iron). Our family name is Ferrario and for the past three generations we have worked with metal. Faré is the local vernacular for blacksmith. Without the accent the word fare in Italian means to make and to do.

Firends of the Faré

The Officina has some truly awesome friends, to include: architects from Studio di Archittettura PRR and Arnuova ; local designers such as Quaderni di Carattere; Dublin-based web creatives Fluidedge,  and walkability and cyclability experts Liberty Bell; the Catalyst and Values in Computing (ViC) team at Lancaster University, who specialise in interdisciplinary work,  community-university partnerships and international research.