The new Eataly which opened in Bari last summer is located in the monumental Fiera del Levante exhibition centre, in an area measuring 8,000 m2. It has a strong focus on local products and producers and features over 1000 producers, 40% of whom come from within the region of Puglia. As in other Eataly locations in Italy and abroad, Eataly Bari offers a multitude of different facilities: a dining area (featuring 15 different theme restaurants), a teaching area and shops, all of which interpenetrate and enrich one another.
“The entrance to Eataly Bari is a century old, and the project involved complete renovation of the building’s monumental façade,” says Fabrizio Lombardo Pijola, RIALP founder and Eataly Puglia partner. “Total investment in Eataly Puglia, an idea we came up with and developed with Oscar Farinetti about 5 years ago, was about 14 million euro, including the construction work and all the equipment. In the past 4 months the numbers have been very encouraging: we have had more than half a million visitors, about 10% of whom came from abroad. Many visitors have also come from surrounding regions, not only from Puglia but from Molise, northern Calabria, southern Campania and Basilicata. We have served 250,000, stayed within our budget, and hired 200 people, with a major impact on employment in the area. Attendance, especially at peak times, for instance during the Fiera del Levante, when we have thousands of people in the area at the same time, has been as high as 8000-9000 people.”
System integration
Because of the large numbers of people who use the facility every day, the whole building and especially the installations had to be designed carefully to ensure maximum indoor comfort. The variables to be taken into account included the number of people present at different times of day and in different seasons. Another important factor is the presence of about 30 intake fans that draw 110 thousand cubic metres out of the building. “And so of course we had to compensate with an air treatment unit on the same scale,” explains Luciano Uva, proprietor of Studio Uva. “This is a historic building in which we had to work with the space available, and so we couldn’t construct a big thermal station with refrigerators, and so we couldn’t use air treatment units. This is why we chose five all-in-one rooftop units with a total thermal power of 1,500 kW, which allowed us to locate the installations on the parts of the terrace that were available. To ensure high efficiency the rooftop units all had to be full inverters, with compressors, plug fans and inverters all controlled by systems that could regulate the rooftop units on the basis of the rate of flow at the time, rates of flow of both extraction and of course delivery, to create comfortable conditions for the occupants.”
