GREEN POWER
Being a water tower
Once upon a time I was a water tower, suspended tank, vital node of the urban living body powerful symbol, bold sign of the human colonization of the natural landscape.
Once upon a time I was a water tower, standing landmark, reference point in the urban fabric, marvellous construction, clear shape of my function.
Now I lost my water, I lost my sense I’m willing to recover my social role to burst out again my green power.
In the modern city, meant as relationship of spaces, measure and function, where nature is under the dominion of technology and production, considered as a decoration of the anthropic environment, there are places that escape the logic of contraposition between natural and artificial. The city can’t find a place or a definition for these kind of hybrid spaces that are folds in the urban landscape, spaces where modifications, variations and metamorphosis are continuously possible. They are dynamic places sensible to changes, marginal if we think about them in relation with already stable environment, but they can become the best places to read the present changes. These spaces can be considered as laboratories to experiment new lifestyles and new practices for landscape’s transformations, in order to find a different balance between man and nature. From this point of view returning power to nature means not only building an ecological sustainable environment, but also creating a base for renewing social relationships.
The water tower is first of all an infrastructural node of basic importance for urban texture, an essential tool for man to inhabit the land, and so it plays a fundamental role of mediation between nature and urbanity. The water tower is an admirable construction, a monument to human technique and therefore to its greatest nature, to be intelligent. A beauty totally human inhabits in its simple, severe, and perfectly functional form. Lastly the water tower is also a landmark, a reference point in the anthropic landscape, and therefore it gains a social value, as an element in which a community can recognise itself and define the place where it lives. The water tower becomes a green tower that maintains and develops urban, technical and social original characteristics.
The building transforms itself from water tank in a vegetation tank. It is not only a garden, a green lung for the neighbourhood where develop and preserve a high level of biodiversity, but it is a real botanic laboratory, a vegetation nursery where it’s possible to study and cultivate plants suitable for the needs of the urban territory. The exterior aspect is substantially preserved, while in the inside the space becomes entirely crossable opening in a whirl of vegetation that varies from level to level at the modification of light, humidity and other conditions. The tower stands as a “Vegetal Babel” that has to be walked along in a spiral of different essences until arriving to the discovery of the secret garden, contained in the former tank. The primordial simplicity of the spiral, that reinterprets the Incas cultivations systems, is an homage to the functionalist pureness of the original construction. The social function of the tower is strengthened and, from a simple landmark, it becomes a real public space for the community, a multiform place, sometimes silent and introverse, other times thick of relations, other open to the view towards the city. The water tower completes its metamorphosis thanks to the green power that gives back a more intense and dynamic life, not only to the building but also to the territory and the nearby communities.
