New ENI Headquarters, Italy

The New ENI Headquarters’s buildings arise from the landscape as an urban island. It lays around a central square which is overlooked, through floor-to-ceiling windows, by the common areas: the atria, the conference center, the restaurant. The complex is composed by three main buildings: the Icon – the tallest building with 11 floors, the Landmark – the biggest buildings covering 23,700 m² and the Skygarden, housing a conference centre. The Icon and the Landmark buildings are connected to each other, at the seventh-floor level, by a 85-metre-long structure. The facade, in addition to playing an important role as an architectural feature, plays an important role from a functional point of view. In fact, it has been designed with the aim of ensuring the highest performance in terms of energy efficiency and natural lighting. The development has been designed to meet Class A energy requirements and to achieve the LEED Gold certification. The sun-shading secondary façade skin is composed by two types of elements: the blue triangular fins and the orange perforated panels. In light of the type, dimension and shape of the façade shading elements, a first desktop study has been carried out to establish the level of risk associated with the interaction of the wind with the façade sun shading elements potentially generating a tonal and broadband noise. Following up the above desktop study a more detailed assessment has been undertaken via an aero-acoustic study of the blue triangular fins where a CFD analysis has been done and via laboratory tests at an ASTM E477 facility on the orange perforated panels.