Accademia’s greenhouse is now a Fabbrica dell’Aria.

Accademia’s greenhouse is now a Fabbrica dell’Aria (Air Factory).

As part of the partnership with PNAT, Accademia’s greenhouse has been turned into a Fabbrica dell’Aria, a true green lung working to clean the air from air pollutants.

Spin-off of the University of Florence, PNAT is a think tank of designers and plant scientists aiming at conceiving creative solutions based on current knowledge of plant behaviors to inspire innovative design concepts and products, from the small to the building scale. The goal is to set up synergic relationships and to mutual exchanges between the natural and the artificial environment, which is the fundamental theme of sustainable design.

The Fabbrica dell’Aria is an innovative botanical filtration system, developed and patented by PNAT, that uses plants to purify the air. Since plants capture polluting molecules and incorporate them into their biomass, the filter has an indefinite duration and is therefore much more efficient than mechanical filtration.

In Accademia, the installation of the Fabbrica dell’Aria was made within the existing coffee plantation so that now it’s coffee plants that clean Accademia’s indoor air.

The monitoring system allows to check the levels of Thermal Comfort Index, Indoor Air Quality Index and the quantity of removed volatile pollutants, allowing for a clear and straight-forward understanding of the quality of the air.

For us at Accademia, the installation of this kind of technology enhances the sustainable value of the greenhouse itself, a representation of an integrated production system fostering environmental, social and economic sustainability. Accademia’s greenhouse was built using as a reference a coffee plantation that could be found in Central and South America, where coffee plants are surrounded by shadow plants, that not only provide shade to coffee cherries, but also other crops for the livelihood of the local community.

Pictures credits: Niccolò Vonci