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The buildings containing the offices form a sort of open grating constructed around a covered square. Thanks to the light appearance of the facades, given by ventilated walls in terracotta, a first-time onlooker ignorant of the use of the building would hardly think that it is in fact a bank.
The project idea was perfected with the collaboration of Giorgio Grandi and Vittorio Di Turi, and is of an urban block that gradually uncovers its internal space. The cylindrical bodies remind us in their form and colour old silos that can be seen around the area: “with irony, working with the members of the Bank, we made two of these bodies into caveau”. One third constitutes a technical volume, whilst the bigger and more central one is the auditorium.
[Source: R. Piano, Giornale di bordo, Passigli Editori, Firenze 1997, p. 188].
The building adjusts harmoniously well to its surrounding buildings, more community structures like commercial buildings, pedestrian passes and squares that compete with each other to give life to this so-called ‘light’ city. The spacious hemisphere surrounded by trees and partly covered by a stretched structure of glass and steel, is the central point of this architectural complex, onto which the entrances to the bank and the 800-place auditorium look out.
The innovation in this sort of project is that the bank seems to have become simply a pretext for an urban restructuring at a high level, the aim of which was to complement the city itself, as if it were creating a new area, rather than being commissioned by a company.
S_TILES: IL PALAGIO
The project of restructuring the facades in terracotta was first made into a prototype and than manufactured by Il Palagio that works with Tuscan terracotta of Impruneta. Twelve tiles extruded and channelled, composed of four times three lines, form the panel of the second part of the buildings, upheld by a base structure in inox steel.
Composed and supported in the same way, but with a different type of anchorage, listels in terracotta form the grated panels that, when placed in front of the fixtures, act as a brise soleil. In the fixtures, there are special pieces that bind together the ‘second skin’ with the back wall at the intersection of the windows’ inner frame. The back wall is smothered with a covering, so as for the whole thing works as an isolated ventilated facade.
[Sources: “Costruire in laterizio”, n. 71/1999; “Arca”, n. 137/1999] |
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