Skinning the Landscape: The Beauty of the Imprint – Reimagining Tannery Architecture Through Craft, Memory, and Landscape | Bachelors Design Project

Site Context

Longarone is a landscape defined by both natural and human traces. The project occupies a hillside next to large existing terraces embedded in the steep Piave valley, where retaining walls, vegetation, and changes in ground level record successive occupations of the landscape. This condition became particularly significant in relation to Longarone’s history, a town reconstructed after the Vajont disaster of 1963.

The proposal introduces a small-scale artisanal tannery into this terrain, reviving traditional vegetable tanning through locally available materials and resources. Beech bark provides tannins for tanning and dyeing, while water, timber, and stone create a direct relationship between production and the surrounding landscape. The program follows the transformation of the hide through receiving, washing, tanning, drying and making, culminating in artisan workshops. Rather than levelling the site, the tannery inhabits its existing terraces, allowing production to unfold through the changing levels of the ground.

Recording through imprint began as a direct act of contact with the landscape. Through touch, pressure, and ink, the surface of Longarone was translated into a series of marks, allowing the site to be understood through material traces rather than observation alone. The process began by pressing kneadable erasers into desired textures, such as the rocky earth of Longarone, embedding the physical qualities of the landscape into their surfaces. The textured erasers were then gently pressed onto an inked page, taking care not to disturb or erase the texture captured within them. Finally, the ink-filled erasers were pressed onto the paper for as long as possible, leaving behind a clear imprint of the landscape and transforming its physical surface into a recorded material trace.

Design Process

The design process began by reading the landscape as a skin—a surface that carries marks, scars, and evidence of change. Through bark rubbings, ink prints, and material experiments with wood and leather, the designer investigated how pressure, texture, and contact could produce an imprint. These studies gradually shifted from recording existing surfaces towards creating architectural form.

Trees became both material and geometric tools within this process. Their branching structures and irregular rhythms informed studies of structural organisation, while bark became central to the tannery itself as a source of natural tannins. Alongside these investigations, the designer studied the sequence and machinery of traditional vegetable tanning, developing an understanding of the requirements of production, circulation, and spatial relationships.

The final geometry developed through an exchange between these systems and the existing terraces. Walls follow, cut into, and extend lines already present within the landscape, while the timber structure establishes a lighter layer above them. The building therefore operates as another skin: shaped by the landscape beneath it while gradually accumulating the traces of making, weathering, and occupation.

Final Outcome

The outcome brings together resolution and material representation to communicate the tannery as both a functioning place of production and an architecture rooted in traditional craft. Detailed interior renders reveal the atmosphere of the working tannery, its materiality, machinery, and relationship between craft, production, and feel.

The project was resolved through large scale A0 hand-drawn plans alongside precisely constructed digital sections, allowing two contrasting methods of representation to coexist. While the digital drawings communicate the technical resolution of the building, the hand drawings deliberately retain the marks, irregularities and imperfections produced through the act of making. Rather than treating these as errors, they become traces of the drawing process itself, reflecting the tactile and traditional processes taking place within the tannery.

Bark rubbings were incorporated into the drawings as textured backgrounds, physically transferring material from the project’s landscape into its representation. The final drawings therefore become imprints themselves, combining precision with the human trace of making.

Conclusion: Ultimately, the project brings together craft, production, and representation, allowing the tannery to exist as both a functional workplace and a material expression of traditional making, where precision and human traces coexist.

[This Academic Project has been published with text and images submitted by the student]