It’s been less than a year since the building plans for Wider‘s new shipyard in Fano were announced. Today, the high-tech facility under construction in Fano is on track to open a first production area in early 2023.

With the heavy foundation work almost complete, the 18,000-sqm seafront site between Fano’s fishing port and the tourist marina is scheduled to start up production in next February.

“The new shipyard will be a real innovation centre,” says Marcello Maggi, who heads up W-Fin Sarl, the holding Company that owns 100% of Wider equity. “It’s where all our future boats, new green technologies and new ideas coming from start-uppers will come to life in full compliance with environmental issues. In other words, a pole of excellence not only for the city of Fano, but also for the Italian boatbuilding industry.”

Stretching over the edge of Fano’s waterfront, the new facility will at once embody and nurture Wider’s vision of a more sustainable nautical world. The first project to be assembled in the new facility, which includes 350 linear metres of quayside and a travel lift, will be the WiderCat 92, the power catamaran series designed by Luca Dini and Wider Centro Stile and equipped with Wider Serial Hybrid Propulsion System, of which five units have already been sold.

Marcello Maggi was keen that local firms should benefit from the investment. He wanted this important project to be conceived and developed by someone capable of reinterpreting the brand's philosophy in an architectural key and also a professional close to the local area. Here the choice fell on the crisply contemporary design of the architects Alessandro Massari and Mauro Cavicchi of the Massari Design Architecture Studio based in Fano.

“The brief was for a structure based on sustainable principles and striking design that also provided the kind of the functional efficiencies associated with modern boatbuilding processes,” says Massari. “It’s not easy to design something that is beautiful but also practical from an industrial perspective.

My own studio is just a few hundred metres from the site of the new shipyard, so like other inhabitants of the town it was very important for me that the building should look good and not be an eyesore.”

Although 14 metres in height, the building’s profile is broken up by large glass surfaces so both office staff and workers on the shop floor can benefit from plenty of natural light. The seaward-facing exterior wall features a stylised outline of Wider yacht that looks like it is floating in the marina. Materials, components and the finished yachts can be easily moved in and out of the shed via four enormous doorways for each of the two sides facing the east and west of the building.

With sustainability a key factor in Wider’s corporate mission, the sheer size of the construction project, once completed, also means the roof will be covered by solar cells and the facility is expected to be virtually self-sufficient in renewable solar power.

The final cladding materials that serve to break up the building’s monumental outline are still being selected, but the slats that covers the exterior walls will likely be of bamboo-based Wood Plastic Composite that is 100% recyclable, resistant to humidity and UV light, and does not deform or discolor over time.