The space destined for shops has been closed in and converted into apartments, as also for the caretaker’ s apartment, while the kindergarten area has been partly taken over by the area’ s centre for the elderly. The social centre, in a not very evident position, is difficult to reach and, probably for this reason, over time, has become neglected and is in a state of marked deterioration. The building which in the project had been planned for the gym is today an empty unused area. The only positive note is the primary school, given that it has maintained its institutional role and has become a pole of attraction for the neighbouring areas. With the idea of a project aimed at improving the energy performance of the whole complex, one of the main problems appears to be linked to the architectural quality that marks the original work and, consequently, the choice of the projects in keeping with the desire to maintain and not destroy the buildings’ original image. In the case of Vigne Nuove, the larger buildings were taken into consideration. The first phase of the study was aimed at an analysis of Building A under a layout, construction, structural and installation profile( fig. 3). The main layout involves the positioning of eight stairwells that provide access to two dwellings per floor in the case of the simplexes( 96 in total) and four in the case of the duplexes( 28 in total). Ground anchoring had been originally solved by introducing a first level a pilotis, which today, unfortunately, has completely lost its meaning as the residents have, bit by bit, illegally closed off a lot of the available space creating private garages.
From the pilotis level there is no free access to the stairs and to reach the balconied gallery an external passage to the first floor must be used. The above two levels, the second and third, host duplex apartments which are accessed from the balconied gallery, at a height of 48.17 m, which is then connected to via Rodolfo Valentino by walkways. However, in these apartments, it was found that the projection of the day zone over the underlying night zone resulted in a continual lack of light. The higher levels, from the fourth up, are made up of simplex apartments, larger than the duplexes. Independently from the apartment typology, the services remain the same – the bathrooms with a north-east exposure and the kitchens, south-west. The study of the construction system resulted in identifying the materials used in the building. The exterior shell is a layer of 8 cm perforated plaster board, with a 14 cm cavity and an exterior prefabricated cement panel with an 8 cm grit-blasted finishing; the walls between apartments are made of 16 cm thick concrete blocks, while the interior partitions are of 8 cm perforated plaster; and the windows are single glazed with aluminium frames; the stairwells are in-situ exposed concrete surfaces. The load-bearing reinforced cement skeleton structure was constructed based on a regular grid system, with gaps between the columns longitudinally alternating between 7.80 m and 2.70 m, while transversally the spacing is 4.58 m. The beams are all of the same height, the bordering ones placed parallel to the longitudinal ones are 1.00 x 0.37 m, while the cross beams are 0.44 x 0.37m; instead, the transversal beams are 0.29 x 0.38 m. The bordering support columns are all the same size, 0.29 x 1.00 m, differently to the cross ones which taper off every two floors from 0.90 x 0.44 m on the ground level to 0.30 x 0.44 m on the top level; the flooring is made of hollow cement bricks with a border to hold the poured concrete of the joists so the intrados surface appears as a continuous tile surface. In correspondence with the longer beams, at a distance of 40 m, we find the structure’ s expansion joints which allow for the subdivision of the very narrow and long floor plan, 180 x12.60 m, into three smaller sections. The joint uses Gerber beams, which rest on top of 20 m sturdy brackets. Therefore, during the construction phase, the main frames were set in place first, due to the lower light element, and then the prefabricated
706 ZEMCH 2015 | International Conference | Bari- Lecce, Italy