Joseph LoCastro

Thesis in Architectural Design

PST SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY PARK IN THE HEART OF THE MEDITERRANEAN - SALINE JONICHE - REGGIO CALABRIA -

Thesis by Giuseppe Lo Castro
Contact email: peppelocastro@libero.it
University of "Mediterranea" of Reggio Calabria
Speaker Prof. Ottavio Amaro
Academic Year 2009 - 2010

The project was born in a coastal area that, if appropriately redeveloped and enhanced, can become the new urban center of reference for other similar situations along the southern coast.
The PST is located in the center of a vast post-industrial landscape (never in operation) characterized by the presence of buildings that have been abandoned for years. At present, it is a marginal area inaccessible to the population that cannot go and experience this place with an admirable landscape.

It is essentially an area that has the potential to accommodate over time the maximum urban concentration of: services, research and advanced production.
The PST is a sustainable response to what they would like to do on the site, that is, a coal power plant which would damage this place again, where there is an admirable landscape, in fact as you can see in one of the tables there is a characteristic image of the place where you can see the beauty of the landscape but also the contamination of man with liquid chemistry.

Therefore the SCIENTIFIC AND TECHNOLOGICAL PARK of Saline Joniche will be a complex system of material and immaterial, physical and perceptive relationships in a space-time container in continuous evolution between development and innovation, ethics and economics.

The landscape is thought of as a life scenario between “functional” and environmental aspects, a complex evolving organism in which its natural, anthropic, humanistic and perceptive matrices interact, therefore not a “landscape-museum” but a “laboratory-landscape” in the sense of exchange and mimetic integration.

The project arises from a very close dialectic between the “park-environment” and the “built” where Nature and Architecture travel in symbiosis; it intends to be a “protagonist” in a system based on the latest innovations in the field of reducing consumption and environmental pollution, with the intent of integrating the different aspects of sustainable architecture with particular attention to the recovery of solar energy, given the characteristics of the place.