A Steel Landscape
Masking of an industrial building for Acciaierie Venete in Trentino
An industrial building 20 meters high and more than 300 meters long between the mountainous slopes of the Lagorai, in eastern Trentino.
A steelworks where incandescent furnaces, without ever extinguishing, transform iron debris into steel bars.
A building located close to a water canal and near the railway and automobile network that connects Trento to the Veneto plain, the Valsugana.
A bulky building, which for years the Province of Trento has been under fire: asking on several occasions the mitigation of its impact on the surrounding landscape.
The issue is intriguing and complex at the same time. The building and the area are in fact extremely visible from several points of view: from above, from the mountainous slopes of Mount Ciolino and Rocchetta, and from below, along the provincial road that is tangent to the steel mill.
The Provincial Urban Plan has organized an urban and environmental redevelopment that requires a project of “masking”, mitigation of visual impact. A theme and a project approach difficult and contradictory but interesting, which we address and discuss in various meetings and for a few years.
The agreed solution is, fortunately, the most abstract and simple, definitely removing from the table masking hypotheses with variations of colors, color bands, which go for the most.
We therefore propose two interventions: a counter-façade, a second skin in micro-perforated sheet metal, along the northern facade, always visible from the road.
The surface of the sheet is not flat but forms a continuous fold that, reflecting differently the light, draws the contour, the skyline of the mountainous slopes that act as the backdrop. A “abstract” interpretation of the surrounding landscape.
A second intervention involves the ground floor of the steelworks, which must be left free for the unloading of ferrous material from trucks and railway wagons. It is “screened” with tomes, which raise the surrounding ground forming undulations of green, with trees of medium trunk that dissolve in some way the volume of the building among the existing tall trees.
Drawings
