With more visitors than ever before, the new airport terminal in Florence will have a green roof and sport a vineyard.
The Italians are passionate about greening their buildings, with the famous Bosco Verticale in Milan being the flagship example.
To celebrate its heritage as one of the wine capitals of the world, the Amerigo Vespucci International Airport in Florence will feature an eight-hectare (19-acre) vineyard on top of its long, sloping roof.
A local, prestigious wine company will harvest the grapes and manage the green vineyard roof, and the vinting will also be done on-site in a cellar on the airport grounds.
The creative minds behind the project are Rafael Viñoly Architects, an American firm that was tasked with redesigning the international terminal as part of renovations to reorient the existing airport runway which is inadequately short and adversely affected by nearby hills.
Linear structures of precast concrete contain the soil and irrigation to sustain the vineyard and are held aloft by a network of branching columns, inspired by the vines they hold up.
The columns shade most of the terminal areas, which will help reduce energy from heating. Skylights will flood these areas with natural light.
“This enormous surface, which hides the airport terminal when viewed from Brunelleschi’s Duomo and other prominent vantage points in the city, will not only serve as a new landmark for the city’s sustainable future, but also as a symbol of the traditions, history and innovative spirit that continue to drive the Italian economy into the 21st century,” the firm wrote on their website.
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Speaking with CNN, Román Viñoly, director of Rafael Viñoly Architects, said that heat exchanger technology will allow for low-emission heating and cooling by using the thermal properties of the soil embedded in the roof above.
“In the summer, when you need to cool the interior of the space, you do heat exchange into that mass of earth,” he says. “It holds that temperature very effectively for a very long time such that when winter comes and you need to warm the interior, you can do heat exchange again and pull the heat out of that soil and put it into the terminal.”
Buone Notizie explains that green roofs in Italy have a history dating back to Roman times, when the cover of the Domus Aurea near the Colosseum in Rome was covered in gardens.
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