Archiprix International 2001
Universita di Chieti, Facoltà di Architettura - Pescara, Italy
Danilo Romani
Daniela Brascugli
Tutors: Prof. Arch. Paolo Desideri, Arch. Andrea Sciolari
The world depends on oil and gas for 63 percent of its total energy requirement. There are now more than 6500 offshore oil and gas installations worldwide, located on the continental shelf of some 53 countries. About 4000 of these are in the Gulf of Mexico, 950 in Asia, 700 in the Middle East, and 400 in Europe. Of the European total, more than 300 are in the North Sea and North-east Atlantic. The exploitation of offshore fields in the Adriatic Sea started in the sixties with the Ravenna Mare and Porto Corsini fields. Nowadays, there are more than 100 AGIP installations in the Adriatic; 32 of them have now exceeded their physical life cycle, which averages 20 to 40 years. What kind of future do these ‘artificial islands’ have?In the Adriatic Sea, just as in the rest of the world, the oil industry will continue to search for oil and build new off-shore rigs. The problem of decommissioning old platforms and of formulating effective local legislation as well as international conventions will become increasingly urgent.Decommissioning is the process set in motion by an operator of an off-shore oil or natural-gas rig in order to plan, gain approval for, and execute the removal, disposal, or re-use of an installation when it is no longer needed for its current purpose. One of the most interesting alternatives to the complete removal of steel structures in shallow waters, as is the case with the Adriatic Sea, is to build of artificial reefs. This means using clean off-shore platforms to create reefs for marine life. Experiments with the redeployment of platforms as artificial reefs have been carried out in the Gulf of Mexico, where they now function as fish-aggregating areas that support recreational fishing and diving. In the northern Adriatic Sea, an accident occurred with the AGIP drilling platform ‘Paguro’ 36 years ago. This represents a unique case study of ‘rigs to reef’. In 1995, a Government Decree recognised the zone as a ‘Biologically Protected Area’, and the ‘Paguro’ association has had permission to carry out guided tours and scuba diving since 1996.An off-shore structure may be redesigned for sustainable energy production too. For example, oil installations can be converted to wind-driven energy installations, exploiting the submarine network of oil pipelines to transport the energy to (dry) land. Fish farming is another way of re-using off-shore platforms. In this case, the platform would be used as a logistic support for caged fish-feeding, management, and monitoring. The horizon of our Adriatic ‘lake’ is so full of these fascinating technological structures that they almost comprise a bridge between the two coasts (Italy-Croatia). The off-shore platforms seem to be an extension of the urbanized Italian coast and of the large-scale infrastructure: pipelines carry oil to land; ships reach the installations not only for working purposes but also for tourist activities, scuba-diving, and sea-fishing; ships use them as landmarks.This recycling project is based on a survey of more than 100 structures in the Adriatic Sea and a study of the relationships between them and the infrastructures on the Adriatic coast: ports, roads, airports, institutional research laboratories and industrial companies that operate in the sea. When formulating the re-use project, we first built an architectonic image starting from a meta-project in which technological and symbolic aspects could be merged. We subsequently tied together all these elements by generating a technical plate that could adopt mari-culture, research facilities, wind-driven installations, and tourist modules.