Year: 2007/2008 Designs currently in development
Client: : Genoa Engineering Department
Teknoarch services: Preliminary, final and executive designs, on-site assistance
Location: Genoa - Colle degli Erzelli
Subcontractor: EuroMilano S.p.A.
Surface area: 23,290 mq
Contract value: REPORT

The building destined to house the technological laboratories will be at the very core of the new Engineering Department, with 77 laboratories belonging to 10 departments from 3 different sectors: information technology, industrial and civil-environmental engineering. Experiments will conducted in the 23,290 m2 distributed between the basement and the two levels above ground, creating a platform for the development of university research in collaboration with private industry. Objectively speaking, the project is highly complex from a functional standpoint, given the need to satisfy a host of distributive, spatial, technological and grouping requirements. The building is conceived as a huge motor, in which the system routes and walkways and the vertical and horizontal distribution elements function much like a fluid that undergoes several transformations in a thermodynamic cycle. Taken together, it consists of 5 large structures, separated and at the same time united by the prisms of the external walkways and the stairwells, a large grilled surface at the roof level and a strip of pierced sheet metal that runs along nearly the entire perimeter of the buildings, along the main perspective lines. This is the result of a process of composition that begins with a conceptual abstraction of the marine metaphor: in fact, the entire laboratory complex is visible from the base slab of the neighboring buildings, which house the departmental lecture halls and offices, so the grill covering the labs is seen from above, like the surface of the sea, in which the walkways, the stairs and the elevator float and sink. The laboratories can be accessed directly from this height (the same as that of the classrooms and department offices) or from the ground floor (parking lot level). The various levels of this "piece of sea" are sectioned in depth, perceived in the changing colors of the pierced band (resembling the colors of the different layers in a geological cross-section), which mimic the varying degrees of penetration of sunlight into the depths of the ocean. The complexity and fragmentation of the plants and sections is controlled by using instruments of proportionality and modulation: large unifying surfaces and few materials, applied repeatedly: prefabricated panels of cement, glass, pierced sheet metal and grilles.