Re-writing historical buildings: strategies of intervention

The project of conservation and intervention on historical buildings is dealt as an opportunity to interpret the theme of re-use through the design of new architectures able to relate with the existing one. For centuries, the trajectories of the design, new and conservation, have travelled on parallel tracks with no possibility of dialogue. Rather it is considered that, in relation to social, economical and environmental impacts, it is necessary to rethink the design strategies and the intervention methods in the historical contexts in accordance with their architectural value and their memory transmission to future generations. Our time is characterized both by cities whose boundaries extend quickly and untidily consuming free soil in the surrounding areas and, on the other hand, by an emptying of the historical centres that, albeit it is characterized by buildings of undisputed architectural value, it is obsolete for the needs of the society. This means, therefore, for designers, gaining understanding of how each architecture becomes strongly historical but also how the time component influences during the construction life. The building is then understood as a text, continuously written and re-written from time shaped custom-made. Architect's task is therefore to think and to plan spaces on a human scale, i.e. environments that can accommodate the needs and the demands of a society in constant transformation and evolution, adapting historical architecture with new interventions in respect of them. So, the starting point changes: no more an empty area for which rules have to be found for the genesis of the project but an area already saturated asking to be cured and to care about. Such attitude is actually already part of what has always happened in our cities for thousands of years, perhaps what requests to change today is the need not to leave it to a mere sporadic practice triggered by the single and by the fulfilment of functional adjustments and regulations but to try to address this issue as a new matter of architecture to which there are still today wide fields of methodological investigation for the intervention on the historical building. The attitude of respect for the existing, depending on whether it is an example of industrial architecture, historical monument or landscape resource can be very different. That being so the issue is faced through different case studies deriving both from a different starting point, this historic building, and from design actions, according to strategies of additions, grafts, subtraction on the existing building.