Natural workshop - the Renzo Piano Building Workshop in Vesima, Italy

Architectural Review, The, Sept, 1995 by Peter Buchanan

To its bases in old buildings in the centres of Genoa and Paris, the Renzo Piano Building Workshop has added another, purpose-built one. Enveloped in vegetation, this inconspicuously hugs a steep slope above the sea at Vesima, 20km west of Genoa. Here the traditional stuccoed buildings are painted earth shades of ochre and terracotta, and agricultural greenhouses cling to terraced mountainsides.

The new building f uses these two local types. From a refurbished farmhouse, a wood-framed glass roof extends to one side and downwards, parallel to the slope. Below the roof, frameless glass walls enclose a series of stepping levels, an architectural equivalent of agricultural terracing. The retaining walls of these and the risers of the steps that link them are finished in the same earthy pink stucco as the farmhouse. The seeming simplicity of construction, the prominence of wood, stucco and fieldstone and the absence of any obvious 'techy' bits other than the automatically adjusted external louvres shading the roof and the funicular providing the only access, is not what many might expect of Piano. Yet in several different ways the building precisely exemplifies Piano's current approach and ideals.

The land belonged to Piano's family and he had long wanted to put it to use. But it was largely the idea of the late Peter Rice, the Ove Arup & Partners structural engineer and Piano's long-term collaborator, to establish on it a laboratory-cum-workshop for researching the structural applications of natural materials, particularly of fibrous plants. Such a project, the development of technology through researching nature, was close to the hearts of both of them. Such research is now conducted there and funded by Unesco. But perhaps the most intense research to date (funded by the EC) has been into how to achieve high thermal inertia, as well as energy efficiency, with lightweight construction.

Partly, it is because of Piano's aesthetic and philosophic predilection for lightness, and partly so that the building could serve as a test bed for research of the latter sort, that the heavyweight construction that is traditional and most thermally effective in the Mediterranean climate has not been used. (The building is air-conditioned. For all its seeming eco-sensitivities, this is no low-energy, low-maintenance 'green' building though it is being used to develop current designs that will be.) Some of the EC-funded research, which is being applied in a huge project by the Building Workshop that is now under construction in Berlin, has involved building a temporary second skin within parts of the building and testing the resulting conditions. Also, the roof was originally two layers of a new high-performance, translucent membrane. This remains on the oversailing eaves, but elsewhere has been replaced by glass because it was noisy during rainstorms. The wood frames around which this membrane was wrapped, so as to leave an air gap, now each hold a unit of double-glazing. Together, frame and glazing constitute the building's characteristic piece'. (Just as a tree can be identified from its leaf, so nearly all of Piano's buildings gain their intrinsic identity, and can be identified from, a single component: the specially developed, repetitive piece.) Here these are unusual both in their inconspicuousness (it takes time for a visitor to identify them as the piece) and in being 'low-tech'- except for the optimistic dependence on modern sealants, necessary because the units are butt-jointed to each other rather than lapped.

The glazed frames span between laminated timber rafters that are joined to similar cross-beams by a steel finger-jointed element. Every second one of these caps a square-sectioned hollow steel post. These posts support the roof and are secured below to the concrete retaining walls that edge each level of workspace. Exposed along the top of each retaining wall is an edge of the steel subframe that supports the wood strip flooring used throughout, except on stairs and the reception area, which are paved in the same black slate as is used externally. Adjacent to each of the horizontal roof beams is a row of cantilevered uplighters (designed for the conversion of the Lingotto factory) that provide night-time illumination. And above the beams and outside the roof is a steel catwalk from which to clean and maintain the roof and its shading louvres.

Roof and retaining walls are the building's dominant elements. Compared with them, the steel posts and the glass walls set back from the roof's edge are very low key in presence. Because of this, few notice the virtuosity of the perimeter glazing: its very tall sheets are laterally restrained only by transparent nylon buttons attached to extremely slender fins. Inside the glass wall along the building's eastern edge that climbs parallel to the funicular rail, and is the only edge not shaded by automatic external blinds (because well shaded by vegetation), is an internal stair connecting all levels of the laboratory-workshop. On the western edge, the glass wall steps in plan, the corners allowing views down to the sea which is otherwise largely obscured by the sloping roof - though from lower tiers the eastern wall affords a fine diagonal view towards Genoa's new harbour.