The Andrea Palladio Power Plant in Fusina, Venice, is being completely renovated by Enel and the Frigerio Design Group, which is part of the Resilience Lab Grid project, which also won the New Energy Spaces award. Through clean energy, sustainable architecture, and biophilic design, its main objective is to represent public landscapes in industries with the implementation of vertical gardens and the circular economy. As can be seen, the aim is to achieve an industrial heritage that is completely repopulated with biodiversity. Read on to find out more about this great plan in Italy.
How Enel is transforming Fusina from a coal hub into a community-focused future
Picture in your mind a huge structure of an industrial building, currently augmented by a diverse and flourishing collection of plants, which lead them on otherwise unseen pathways and identify the several microclimates that plants create. This infrastructure is presented as great beauty, appealing the visitor to ask questions about air, energy, and water, and to prove why Venice is bold enough to reconsider its waterfront in surprising and transformative manners.
In Fusina, the Andrea Palladio power is being presented again. The Frigerio Design Group project for the “Resilience Lab Grid” got the Enel “New Energy Spaces” competition and turned grey factories (coal-fired power station) into an energy hub, interlacing vegetation into architecture and landscape to mediate among the lagoon, industrial heritage, and recent public existence.
This civic perspective counters views of grey factories as isolated, pollution-generating relics. More than that, nevetheless, it opens up the question of how industry can take part of urban living, through services, knowledge, and public space, and at the same time dealing with the environmental and social legacies, embedding grey factories into the cultural and ecological realities of the city.
How nature forms a design language that feels both timeless and modern
Fusina includes vegetation into agriculture, creating biophilic designs that modify plant life into architecture as opposed to decoration. Vertical walls, planted courtyards, and permeable facades control microclimates, filter air, and connect machinery, workers, and visitors together, evidence that vertical gardens can be infrastructural while migliorating comfort, biodiversity, and civic narrative for an industrial space.
The practical and symbolic gains of integrating vertical gardens into factory designs
Living walls are both a practical and symbolic modifcations of the industrial complex. Vegetated facades and courtyards can absorb dust, decrease solar gain, and limit humidity, necessary measures within Venice’s sensitive maritime climate. Collectively, these chances highlits how green infrastructure can migliorate environmental performance, just like this sun sculpture, transforming parks into power.
In addition to the technical and operational purposes gotten by green interventions, each is a rebranding of the site that illustrates ecological transition and permits the plant to be used as an educational venue regarding sustainable retrofits.
When connected with the investgation and community programs, vertical gardens turn to be living laboratories. Visitors are exposed to species trials, irrigation trials, and biodiversity tracking through tours and workshops, chaning a previously derelict factory site into a venue that sparks curiosity and promotes ecological stewardship.
Beyond the aesthetics lies a blueprint for urban regeneration
Fusina’s grey factories evolution underlines a bigger opportunity: reused industrial sites can serve as anchor cheese of green corridors, recent public space, and local economies linked to circular economies. The three-pronged perspectives of energy transition, adaptive reuse, and vertical factory farming can drive job creation, tourism, and cultural programming and in the meatime remediating environmental legacies.
For cities with post-industrial landscapes, the message is easy: when we reinvent the landscapes in ways that respect history and ecology, we can transform grey factories into living generators of resilience, culture, and civic renewal.
Fusina shows how industry and nature can live together, making grey factories resources for common civic, ecological purposes. Using vertical gardens and collaborative design, Venice is creating resilient spaces that preserve cultural identity and benefit people and ecosystems, just like the futuristic Twister Star, that combines art and energy. This perspective can be emulated globally to develop new approaches to leverage industrial lands.
