Type: University Project
Team: Dario Castellari, Federico Landi, Alessandro Cascone, Giovanni Checchia
Year: 2012
“A friche (neglected land) is a parcel of land left behind to the unhindered development of plants that settle there”
Gilles Clemént
The project’s aim is to insert a biofuel refinery in the city centre of Mirandola, a medium-sized municipality in the middle of Pianura Padana.
The production of fuel from microalgae represents one of the most important alternatives to fossil fuel.
It is a renewable element that uses algae as its source of natural deposits: the process starts with microalgae cultivation inside water tanks. After that, there is the centrifugation of the product with additives. The procedure needs a great quantity of water, light (natural or through feed-back system of LEDs) and CO2.
The cultivation process can be accelerated through bacteria such as modified Escherichia Coli, which interact with algae improving energetic efficiency.
Microalgae’s growth takes place into photobioreactors, specific installations for production of photo-trophic microorganisms outside their natural but inside an artificial environment by utilizing light energy.
With the help of the master’s thesis project of Federico Caldana from the University of Padova, we studied today’s main typologies of photobioreactors for microalgae’s cultivation, which are:
- open ponds;
- tank photobioreactor;
- plastic bag photobioreactor;
- panel photobioreactor;
- pipe photobioractor.
Using these technologies to obtain biofuel, the process needs a large scale production, characterized by a huge quantity of water (2000 litres of water for 1 liter of biofuel).
The project area is composed by an heterogeneous set of unused buildings.
We started from observing some spontaneous vegetation grown in adbandoned spaces within the area.
This is “Third Landscape” vegetation, as Gilles Clement wrote in his Manifesto.
As the residual portion of land can become a friche, who can be trasformed in a garden, we will follow the same process in the project.
The industry is implanted in the residual and it is conceived as a garden.
The suggestion of Clement’s “Moving Garden” is pull through endorsing the program of microalgae refinery: a new industrial landscape always in change, open to the people and offering new kind of spaces.
