The re-invention of the tower house for the construction of green buildings NZEB, integrated with the vertical axis small wind system

Nowadays the cultural and economic context aims to create a sustainable "car-bon zero" society through energy-efficient green buildings NZEB, but it has so far overlooked a construction type widely spread throughout Europe, especially in the Middle Ages, and that in Italy still characterizes the most beautiful landscapes of Tuscany and other cities: the tower-house. The aim of the research was to verify the possibility of reinventing the type of the familiar tower-house, which is intrin-sically directed to conquer the height and therefore higher wind conditions, assum-ing the installation on the top of a small wind system to use wind energy, to make the building energetically self-sufficient. This building is designed from a wooden structure of a deciduous tree widespread in the Italian region of Basilicata, the Turkish Oak, which, subject to processes of hygrothermal conditioning, can be transformed into the base material to compose laminated timber beams and pil-lars, able to guarantee a load of exercise, to bending stress, equal to 40.9 N/mm2, as followed by tests in the Laboratory of Engineering of the University of Basili-cata, Potenza. With normal wind conditions in the city of Potenza (average of 6.5 m/s), a 5 kW wind turbine mounted at 25 m tall on a 13 m high building is able to provide all the energy the building needs, with its attractive tapered oval top that minimizes turbulence. Entirely made with structures, finishes and natural insula-tion, the building is a sign in the landscape, history and future together.