EMOTIONING TOPOGRAPHY
Photovoltaic roof
​Pordenone, Italy
The project is about the re-territorialization of a series of commercial warehouses: combining the need to renovate the facade and to design the parking area in front of the building, the architecture reconnects the building to the surrounding environment through the staging of a new landscape that tries to absorb the character of that countryside, now forgotten by that area of the town, outskirt of Pordenone.
A light modular structure supports the semi-transparent protective tech fabric and thirty thousand flexible blades that cover four thousand square meters parking area: the system offers, in the summer season, a delightful diffused shadow in different layers. The rubber blades are moved by the wind gifting an always different dynamic effect, creating an emotional landscape, evoking an evergreen grass field. The blades are part of a photovoltaic system, in fact, they are covered by a soft flexible membrane equipped with small semi-spherical silicon spheres.
I’m seventy years old, I was born in this town. I have the eighth grade, but I worked hard all my life and I built all by myself: I have my company and my beautiful warehouse, thanks to this, all my children studied at the university. Now they work for the company, … and they are ruining everything: they just wanted to renovate my warehouses, “is the future”, they said, “Dad, times have changed”. My warehouse now looks like hills, I do not understand how truck drivers can still find us, covered with a kind of green grass. “Dad,” they say “don’t you understand that these are special stems that produce energy? Since we have installed, we no longer pay the bills. “Dad” they repeat “don’t you see how beautiful it is now? don’t you see how the new structure also repairs the cars? Don’t you see that it gives shade in summer and in this way it is cooler? Dad trusts us, this is the future” and finally, they give me the coup de grace: “Daddy can’t you see? It Doesn’t even look like a warehouse … “