The facades along the Cassaro in Palermo: historical-building characterization, degradation, restoration norms for intervention

Abstract

The good-will to operate in the old town privileging the history and the maintenance of historic buildings, is manifest in this study on the Vittorio Emanuele monumental street, the foundation axis of Palermo, and it’s architectural degraded and disfigured fronts. The search concerning sixty civil buildings is based initially on a cognitive process that includes historical analysis, geometric and dimensional survey, investigation on constituent materials and decay systems, in relation to environmental or anthropic causes. The study includes a design proposal that, according to the individuality of cases, it would represent an intervention code about some recurrent critical aspects on which it’s possible to intervene only applying codified procedures. The proposed designs show so an application to concrete cases, not abdicating to involve physical and economic urban environment: the re-qualification of building materials and architectural language would respect the historical image without depressing the market demands. Dipartimento di Progetto e Costruzione Edilizia (DPCE)§ viale delle Scienze, 90128 PALERMO The façades along the Cassaro in Palermo: historical-building characterization, degradation, restoration, norms for intervention. Abstract In the last decade some local communities, by urban plans and codes of practice, sensitized planners and operators about the necessity to intervene on historical buildings considering the environmental typicalness, recognizable in use of materials, constructive techniques and lexical schemes: it is in an evident dialectic with the Italian academy, strongly reluctant to accept that historical architecture in our cities has to be safeguarded, preserved, repaired, restored, rather study-cases for capricious experimentations. The city of Palermo is an efficacious example, with its historical centre regulated by an Executive Particular Plan (PPE) that privileges the history and the maintenance of historical building, according to trends that allow also the historical urban tissue reconstruction damaged or cancelled by tragic events. The study recently commissioned by the civic administration follows this idea, and it regards an urban context of great interest and complexity because of its historical-architectural characters: the Cassaro monumental street (today called Corso Vittorio Emanuele). By the sides of this city foundation axis, the actual form of architectural fronts overlaps a complex stratification; the heterogeneity of architectural styles and constructive systems, using often plaster and stucco rather than stone, catches a glimpse of the inextricable formation and evolution of its actual architecture behind every degraded area. We could so punctually recognize medieval urban tissue like in adjacent parts, the rectifications of alignment and the sixteenth-century aggregations, the monumental replanning of some eighteenth-century façades; and also the earthquakes and war events damages, the nineteenth-century completions and interventions with hygiene and decorum intents, especially after the Unity of Italy, when Palermo had to appear like the other cities of the new State. All this conditions had to coexist in a difficult city, where decorum of monumental architectures has been often subdued to comfort and to commerce demands, to the fragmentariness provoked by nobility decadence, to the aggressive and disfigured installations. The study of architectural fronts analyzes about sixty civil buildings along the Vittorio Emanuele main street, and it’s initially founded on a cognitive process that includes historical analysis, geometric and dimensional survey, analysis of material and decay systems. We particularly analyzed both the relationships among decay systems and historical stratifications, both the grammar of architectural façades language. In a second phase, this study includes a project proposal t