Piano Vulcano Buono

The largest multifunctional and shopping center in Italy was opened before last Christmas. The design of this remarkable building comes from the famous architect Renzo Piano. Vulcano Buono, as the building is named, is a unique structure that interacts with the landscape in a completely new way, effectively hiding its utilitarian shopping and entertainment functions within artificial terrain waves. It thus references the nearby volcano Vesuvius.
Renzo Piano chose the concept of a "volcano" slightly emerging from the surrounding landscape for this enormous project. There is a total of 147,000 square meters of covered retail space wrapping around the central piazza. Central to it is a huge hypermarket, complemented by shopping with 180 stores, a nine-screen multiplex cinema, and a Holiday Inn hotel with 150 rooms.
The entire complex is served by a series of heat pumps, which engineers from Piano's team chose not only for their energy efficiency but also for ease of installation.
The entire construction cost 210 million euros and employs 1,700 people. The shopping center is 40 meters tall and has an internal atrium diameter of 170 meters. The artificial hill in the middle of the landscape brings new impulses to the usually monotonous architecture of shopping malls, representing a somewhat ecological contribution to contemporary construction. Renzo Piano comments on his concept: "This project is a new, modern interpretation of the shopping mall theme. It is not a sad box somewhere in the landscape by the road, but it creates a new landscape. We wanted to emphasize ecological aspects at the same time." For this reason, 2,000 trees have been planted on the premises.

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Article taken from the portal www.mycode.cz