RESILIENT RESTORATION AND REUSE. Methods, instruments and tools

The paper presents a preliminary impact assessment method in the case of interventions for functional recovery and existing buildings regeneration, based on the concepts of resilience and sustainability. The research illustrates the theoretical, methodological and design aspects connected to the concept of resilience, understood as a transformation of an existing building, with particular attention to the definition of methods for the knowledge and evaluation of critical points and vulnerability of the architectural heritage. It’s considered as indispensable premise to understand the impact of possible design actions and to monitor the transformability thresholds of the building itself, in order to set up a sustainable reuse. The aim is to define and to describe a pre-planning analysis and assessment tool capable of supporting the decision-making processes. This synthetically stated methodology is the result of an ongoing research at the STEP Laboratory of the University of Pavia with the goal of proposing a tool capable of supporting decisions in the preliminary stages of processes oriented to adaptive reuse, in order to evaluate the compatibility of different transformative hypotheses coherently with the conservation needs of an existing building. The possible developments of this methodology could concern its application as decision support tools for building and urban regeneration interventions where the preliminary assessment of re-used sustainable scenarios and the impact evaluation on the existing buildings is necessary, starting from the preliminary phases of the design process.