“TECHNOLOGICAL PROJECT” AND HERITAGE ENHANCEMENT (in CICOP)

Abstract

Recovering our building heritage has a fundamental role regarding renewal process, since it constitutes one of the strategies for urban and territorial balance. Building recovery, in the broadest sense of the word, means the renewal of precious constructions which have decayed or outdated but could be renewed and/or requalified. In other words, recovery is a subject which solves the probable damages of a building, trying to bring it back to its original living conditions; otherwise referring to the intervention which confronts the damages provoked by the weather and, more often than not, by the absence of maintenance. In any case, technological innovation can intervene systematically basing itself on analytic and diagnostic studies, regulated and supported by new scientific instruments. The project of building recovery and heritage enhancement, therefore, mainly addresses the adjustment to new housing and urban needs, but it is obviously conditioned and/or “restricted” by the limitation of the building itself, in particular when the intrinsic characteristics must be preserved.The concept of “restriction” extends to its relation with the site, to the quality of the image, to the living conditions. Therefore any intervention of building recovery needs a philological study as a starting point, which consists of a critical interpretation of the building and its context. Such a study is the result of an inseparable relation between the construction’s “previous state” and its “current condition”, or rather, between the materials and the constructive technique, the method from which form and function originated and the preset structural state which is obsolete. The knowledge, or better the “recognition” as C. Brandi would say, is the instrument and, at the same time, the main cultural objective of recovery.