Myocardial Augmentation Facility, Orvieto, Italy Part 1 Project 2013 Thomas Bush De Montfort University | UK The hill top town of Orvieto in Italy is one of a few towns that is a “Cardiac Protected City”. It protects its population through education and training, along with the placement of 11 automated external defribulators in the most public areas of the city, with many more placed in private premises such as shops and restaurants.The building is the next proposed stage of protecting the city; it is a cardiac augmentation facility. It is to be a specialist cardio treatment and research unit; it achieves this through the augmentation of people through medicine, technology and architecture.The concept comes from the idea of medicine being a process of augmenting people, extending and increasing the quality of their life. It also comes from the way in which the population of Orvieto have augmented their city to suite their needs and requirements, through the creation of caves underneath their properties, to use as storage and shelter through times of siege and hardship. This elevates the city from merely just a piece of rock to something that has been improved and moulded by the people of the city.It is proposed that the facility will use cutting edge technology to protect the population of Orvieto. It will achieve this through the use of a city wide monitoring system that will be able to protect the population through the early detection of cardiac problems.Working in conjunction with this system will be a network of underground tunnels connected to the building which link the furthest reaches of the city to the facility. This is needed due the winding and narrow nature of the streets of Orvieto, a normal ambulance cannot transverse many of the routes of the city due to their size and, when having a cardiac arrest, the time taken to transport a patient is one of the critical factors affecting survival.The building can be seen as an allegory for a body, the spaces being the organs, the circulation the veins, and the structure the skeleton. Each its own separate system but augmented by one another to form a greater system. Tutor(s)