Code-compliant structural design for site specific works of art: a case-study

The multi-cultural metropolis presents a large number of spontaneous art endeavours. The street-art and site specific contemporary art earned a special role in the urban renewal; they can be considered as a potential source of urban regeneration, becoming a possible catalyst of the needs of the community, involving the inhabitants in a new vision of urban space and inducing a crea tive change of the cities (Zaffi 2017). These interventions, sometimes, are difficult to classify under a structural point of view: indeed, they are temporary art works, whose dimensions and properties confer them a structural role in the urban scenario. In this paper an experience made in Florence is presented, erasing from the cooperation between the University of Florence and the artist Clet. The intervention consists of creating a big temporary three-dimensional nose-shaped staging which should change the façade of a forsaken industrial building, currently located in a modern residential area. The purpose of the staging was to enhance the area, underlining the role plaid by the building, which is the symbol of the industrial identity of the town in the first half of the XX century. The experience, part of a research funded by a local real estate company, involved the students of the School of Architecture of Florence in a whole project experience from the design phase to the building site where they, practising themselves i n self build techniques, and together with the artist, realized the work of art. A multidisciplinary team, coordinated by the authors, lead the activities from the image promotion to the final construction of a big wooden structure of over than 12-meters length. A big nose called "Maso" would have to turn the façade of the old power plant in a friendly face. The placement of the artwork on the façade has been a crucial step. Indeed, at the time, there were no specific requirement to comply for the structura l safety of the artwork. Nevertheless, the dimension and the location of the object leaded to face the structural issue; the building company, which had the technical responsibility of the staging, decided to hang the wood structure through a couple of heavy hooking plates to fix at the façade walls. The plates, however, increased very much the global weight of the artwork, and - consequently - the structural complexity of the staging. Therefore, a special structural investigation was made, without following the usual procedures, to check the safety of the staging. In these last months, the Regional Government of Tuscany introduced a technical requirement for temporary constructions and art works, which, anyway, only partially helps the safety assessment of the case-study.