Public Assistance Headquarters – Vignola (Italy)

The Public Assistance service headquarters in Vignola is an example of sustainable building construction that responds to an environmental requirement and simultaneously addresses an equally important social need. The building is based on a painstaking design project by Sistem Costruzioni engineers, based on the efforts to find the perfect combination of efficiency, safety, and energy saving, while keeping construction costs to the minimum and allowing rapid construction times.

The Vignola Public Assistance service is staffed by around 350 voluntary workers and it covers a total surface area of 470 m2, with 3 store rooms for the workshop, civil defence unit and storeroom for public assistance services. In addition, there are two shelter roofs for the 17 vehicles used to serve the areas of Vignola, Spilamberto, Castelvetro, Marano and Savignano.

 

The new Vignola Public Assistance headquarters is composed of a main building in which the voluntary staff work and in which they are accommodated as they wait their turn to come on duty. The same building also hosts the office for secretarial work and coordination of dialysis and inter-hospital transport services and various other healthcare and social sector services. The garage for the emergency/urgent mission vehicle are directly annexed to the site’s operational centre.

The shelter roofs for the vehicles used by the association and the stores and vehicles workshop are all located in the immediate vicinity of the operational centre.

The entire project was developed using timber as the main material for construction of the buildings and other structures. The main building is composed of a timber structure with Xlam load-bearing walls and timber roof with rafters and joists. The building is a single storey above-ground structure and has a single double pitch roof that runs the entire length of the structure and two flat roofs for the two service areas, namely the kitchen/canteen area and the workshop for vehicles employed for emergency/urgent services. The entrance is composed of a cylindrical volume that is elevated with respect to the rest of the building.