We participated in the beauty contest organized by Terna for a new Sa.Co.I.3 plant in Suvereto. The power plant is destined to become the most powerful "green energy" production plant in Europe. The main building, which once built, will be over 160 meters long, 20 high and 40 deep is located along a secondary road near the village of Suvereto and near renowned wineries. The announcement requested a solution capable of mitigating its cumbersome presence. Below you will find the concept and some renderings of our proposal.

The team, led by the architect Claudio Nardi, was composed, in addition to the staff of Claudio Nardi Architects, by the architects Roberto Bruni, Giacomo Dolfi, Daniele Biondi, Gabriele Levrini, Alessandro Panci and the staff of PSTUDIOARCH and by the engineers: Francesco Lo Gerfo, Barbara Squarcini, Riccardo Prini.

Experts & consultants:
Agricultural Science Expert: Professor Paolo Emilio Tomei Multimedia:
Architect Alice Buroni and Visual Artist Palo Buroni (STARK), Lighting:
TARGETTI technical office,
Perimeter cladding: NovoWood technical office.

CONCEPT

The idea is to transform the "Suvereto Conversion Station" settlement into a land art operation, a conceptual, immaterial and repeatable architecture (changing its scale and course), because it consists of large simple, modular, easy-to-maintain elements. In fact, the external cladding of the building appears, more than as a ventilated wall, as a large mantle, which now laps the building and now opens, expanding outwards, eliminating the perception of angles and extension in height , like a wave that does not underline and define the mass of the building, on the contrary it dematerializes it. The mantle is composed of a series of very high rods (made of WPC h 25m, 2 diameter 0.2m with a metal stiffening core) that project upwards, like a dense forest. The wavy shape, in plan, of the perimeter of this "mantle", between the wing itself and the building, creates large spaces with tall trees, whose branches emerge in an irregular and natural way between the rods. The resulting surface, soft, fragmented, with a wooden appearance, integrated with the new tree essences, will create an expressive atmosphere, halfway between the language of land art and that of landscaping in green. The facades of the main building will simply be painted the same color as the reed cladding, eliminating all the materials and volumetric overhangs envisaged in the previous project.

We worked on the different perception between day and night; during the daytime the softness of the coloring of the temples will be perceptible, the contrasts will then sometimes be accentuated by the movement of the shadows, which will seem to rotate around a wood of “sundials”. At night, a slight hidden illumination will softly underline, along the entire extension of the external walls, the soaring of the "fifth", while the heads of the rods will contain light sources (a further "sign" to be activated at particular times) that extend and evaporate in the dark.

Finally, we have foreseen the possibility of carrying out, in the future, an upgrade that allows controlled public access to the above areas. One dedicated to teaching, where students, through the use of multimedia technologies, will be able to learn about the power generation of the power plant; a second dedicated to "traditional" art exhibitions while the last is designed as a multimedia exhibition space. Within the teaching area and the exhibition space, the new technology multimedia walls will allow you to interpret the architecture in which they are inserted in a completely new and innovative way. The spaces thus take on an additional functionality and are reinterpreted with the aim of transmitting and communicating content for educational or museum purposes, while the immersion of the installation adds an additional component: the emotional one. The interactivity allows the observer to interact with the images by creating real interactive stories through special effects in sync with the observer's movements. The idea is to go beyond the mere make-up of the facade and make the building "attractive" not only visually but also functionally in order to offer unprecedented opportunities for cultural development to the local and non-local communities.