When fire destroyed an Italian garden center in the Piemonte region of Italy, the family owners decided to build back better – and in just 13 months.
But this would be no ordinary project. Gardenville in Biella would integrate growing and retail space with catering facilities. It would feature natural materials and, for understandable reasons, be resilient to fire.
A space that would give panoramic views of the Biella mountains to visitors would also nurture 2000 square meters of horticultural glasshouse in a project of 4500 square meters in total. So the new concept would need to be precisely climate-controlled.
The Sorrentino family brought in Idroterm Serre, a greenhouse builder specializing in engineering plant and solutions founded in 1973. Today it specializes in turnkey deliveries of glass and plastic greenhouses and equipment, but it also worked on the original Gardenville garden center back in 1997.
Engineer, Barbara Guastalla, is a partner at Porto Mantovano-based Idroterm Serre. She says that the Sorrentino family gave a very firm directive to build with quality and to re-open on a very tight time-scale. The story is told in detail in an article by Paola Milani in the Italian garden trade magazine, GreenLine.
The 4500m2 Gardenville garden center in Bielle, Italy, where a rigorous specification for quality, energy saving and shading were to be combined in a turnkey project delivered in record time
Guastalla told Svensson that one thing that differentiated the project from a more traditional greenhouse construction was the family’s desire to maximize the sense of space by leaving the sloping roof volume open. Additionally, complying with fire regulations led to the choice of wooden beams.
“We abandoned steel because for a resistant R30 structure we would have had to use very special thicknesses or special paints, needing to be renewed over time,” Guastalla explains.
“With wood, it was sufficient to increase the thickness to reach the required fire resistance,” she says. “We had already built a wooden structure for the University of Bologna and we were able to tackle the project directly and quickly, as the customer requested.”
She says it has resulted in an unusually architectural and pleasing visual appearance, given the very high functional requirements of the building. “We obtained a good aesthetic result because of a good match between the white curtains and the wooden structure,” she explains. The white curtains were Svensson’s Harmony 7445 R FR shade screens.
Idroterm Serre were able to draw on their experience of designing the wood-framed Cadriano Experimental Center at the University of Bologna (photo: University of Bologna).
