Conservation and innovation: the enhancement of Cultural Heritage

The principal aim is to address the delicate yet complex and urgent couple between Cultural Heritage and Environment. On one side, we are faced with a Heritage that is increasingly obsolete in relation to the compliance with new needs, the gradually stringent performances and regulatory requirements, use and environmental context. On the other side, the increasingly strict environmental policies impose on the World, and in particular on the construction sector, the need for a gradually virtuous radical change and a general revision in conceiving and setting up the architectural design project respecting the environment. Therefore, designers are asked to carefully evaluate the project choices with impacts on the raw materials production, on materials choices, transport management, control of the construction phases and, finally, the behavior of the buildings over time. The main challenge is to learn how to set up heritage ‘innovative’ conservation actions. This apparent antinomy between Heritage and environmental challenges as a combined system, finds a response in sustainable and adaptive reuse strategies as possible intervention tools in compliance with the historical-architectural, technological and material constraints of the existing with increasingly stringent environmental dictates. This apparent dichotomy becomes the key to planning actions that set new life, new uses of the Heritage, enhance the building itself and the context while preserving environmental needs.