Liberty winter gardens in Palermo: contamination from solar design

Abstract

At the end of the 19th century, the city of Palermo boasted a tradition of steel elements that could include the most beautiful railings and light steel structures of the time. The paper shows how the technological, formal and spatial aspects of the metallic construction was derived by the application of Central Europe areas examples to the local reality, providing notions on designs, experimentations and originalities. Canopies, verandas, winter gardens and orangeries are architectural elements in iron and glass that represent an added value for the building, they improve the life quality of the people who live there. In particular, in the Liberty architecture these elements took shape through bold and richly decorated iron structures. These systems offered multiple configuration possibilities and they combined quality, design and innovation with the extraordinary advantages of iron, such as durability, stability and strength. These elements took on a decorative value and at the same time, they substantially contributed to the image and characterization of the building. In addition, they contributed to the improvement of the indoor comfort, especially in winter. The integration of glass and decorated iron had an excellent application especially in Ernesto Basile’s architecture in Palermo. Ernesto Basile's Liberty period in Palermo is a happy example of technical, material and formal experimentation. This work shows the results of a research that aims to verify the permanence and variation of structural and decorative aspects of iron constructions in that historical period. Furthermore the study could define, through computational tools, models and study cases to verify the original passive system of the winter gardens conceived and developed in an empirical way but actual nowadays.