Inhabitat

Colossal Green Volcano Building Rises in Italy

sustainable design, green design, volcano buono, renzo piano, green roof, sustainable architecture, building, energy efficient architecture

A jaw-dropping feat of architecture has risen in the Italian city of Nola, just a stone’s throw away from the cataclysmic Mt. Vesuvius. Designed by Renzo Piano, Vulcano Buono is an epic cone-shaped commercial center crowned with a gorgeous sloping green roof. Piano’s “good volcano” contributes a vital new space to the southern edge of the Nola commercial district, which is the most most important freight terminal complex in southern and central Italy.

sustainable design, green design, volcano buono, renzo piano, green roof, sustainable architecture, building, energy efficient architecture

Inspired by the surrounding landscape, Vulcano Buono has a gently sloping profile that rises from the earth as a grassy green knoll. The structure’s roof is carpeted with a vegetative layer of over 2,500 plants that helps to insulate the interior spaces and reduces the structure’s visual impact so that it’s barely visible from space. Renzo Piano clearly has a penchant for grassy hills – see also the undulating green roof that tops the California Academy of Sciences.

A 150 meter-wide clearing in the volcano’s crater lends space for an outdoor theater, a market, and a sloping pine forest. Rising around this heart is a concentric series of circles that form the center’s commercial areas. The volcano’s slopes are held by structural components meant to evoke trees – each “trunk” sprouts three or four supporting “branches”.

The roof of Vulcano Buono is laced with a series of skylights fitted with solar-control double-pane glass that allows daylight to filter through the mall, reducing energy needs from lighting. The interior of the complex houses shops, a supermarket, a 2,000 seat cinema, restaurants, and a hotel. Renzo Piano describes the building as “a contemporary take on a greek marketplace, a void as a place for events, meetings, dialogue and the gathering of people”.

+ Renzo Piano Building Workshop

+ Vulcano Buono

Photos by Moreno Maggi

sustainable design, green design, volcano buono, renzo piano, green roof, sustainable architecture, building, energy efficient architecture

9 Responses to “Colossal Green Volcano Building Rises in Italy”

seamusdubh Says:

September 14th, 2009 at 8:14 pm

Now if they made the parking lot the same way, then you’d have something.

isitgreen Says:

September 15th, 2009 at 9:56 am

So what happens to the monolithic parking lot surrounding it.. is it to represent the ash that a volcano spits out? or molten lava hardened to form an enormous and hideous parking lot? Is it that the building was more hideous than the parking lot, that it had to be well tucked away while putting the parking lot on display?

isitgreen Says:

September 15th, 2009 at 10:01 am

So was the building design more hideous than a parking lot that it had to be well tucked away under a green hill, but allowing to put the parking lot on display? Or is the parking lot a representation of the molten lava from the volcano that hardens over surface? Just for a concept????
feels like Inward views for buildings and habitable spaces and a wonderful view of the green mound for the parked cars…

jmanooch Says:

September 15th, 2009 at 8:01 pm

This kind of post is so indicative of what is wrong with the contemporary environment, and in particular environmental design community. You seem stuck in ‘wow’ mode. Can you really not summon any deeper thought – not even any deeper aesthetic sensibility – than ‘oh hey, kewl, grass on a volcano thingy!’? Really??

Commercial centre which is ‘vital’? Well, blow me down with a feather, haven’t heard that one before. Okay, I have – almost everywhere anyone wants to build anything, ahem – but what I /haven’t/ heard before is this “structural components meant to evoke trees” instead of, you know, trees. And the presentation of extraordinary breakthrough things called ’skylights’ that…wow…let light through the roof and…well, prevent other lighting being required.

Please.

This stuff has become a parody of itself. You deviate so far from recognisable sustainability thinking it’s honestly hard to know where to start. Sustainable transport and infrastructure? /Accessible/ outdoor green spaces? Creative and technical and measurable sustainable design?

Wow? More like bow-wow: just wag your tail when some mega-architect says so.

kingpj Says:

September 23rd, 2009 at 6:47 am

This reminds me how unserious some of our leaders are when making policies…its time some of us stood up and supported the noble cause, our environment our future.

Neath Says:

September 24th, 2009 at 10:46 pm

I have to agree that what seems like a potentially interesting project gets completely skewered by a mammoth parking lot circling it. Parody in architecture may have been interesting in the 70’s but now it just seems stupid, well, retarded is probably the better word. We haven’t learned anything it seems.

sooperhooman Says:

September 25th, 2009 at 4:19 pm

Yes surely they could have provided underground parking if they were already constructing a huge mound. Or they could have constructed similar shaped parking facilities that look like mini-canoes.

jmanooch Says:

September 25th, 2009 at 7:35 pm

Glad that others are coming in here and deprecating this nonsense.

The problem, though, is not this building: it’s one more piece of pretentious, greenwash sh*te, that we sustainability designers have to wade through. Who cares? Plus ca change, etc.

The problem is that this (kind of) website, or at least this author, seems to have no shame in talking it up as if it’s a breakthrough in both aesthetic and sustainability design terms. Skylights as green innovation? Mega car-parks instead of /any/ other solution? Oh for pity’s sakes.

There’s right now, between the sustainability and design/architecture worlds, a very brittle connection being tacitly struck, which goes like this: we will only achive sustainability with great design (the sustainability practitioners and ideologues are learning…), and great design is only great if sustainable, truly speaking (the architects etc are learning…).

This kind of article seriously damages that synergy, that deal. It makes out that starchitects can do what the f*ck they like, and actually pretty righteous websites – as this one started out – will make it look and sound great. If websites like this lionise projects like this, the environmental movement is dead: it’s just fragmented hopes and struggles.

Get with the plan: talk up the good stuff, call out the bad.