Negli ultimi due secoli – da quando si è sviluppata una consapevole cultura della tutela – la nozione di rovina ha fortemente polarizzato le opinioni degli architetti: i restauratori l’hanno considerata come un frammento da usare per ricostruire l’edificio perduto; i conservatori, invece, ci hanno visto dentro la fine del ciclo vitale di un edificio. Malgrado questi due atteggiamenti fossero animati da mentalità opposte, essi condividevano la convinzione di affermare una verità: nel primo caso, la verità della compiutezza della forma originaria; nel secondo, la verità dello scorrere del tempo. Queste verità ritrovavano il loro denominatore comune nel considerare la rovina come una testimonianza del passato. Eppure la rovina è qualcosa di più e di diverso da questo. Essa possiede uno spesso ignorato potere evocativo che può dar vita a un edificio diverso da quello che essa era in origine. In altre parole, può tornare a vivere trasformandosi. Questa trasformazione può essere di due tipi: la prima ignora la storia dell’edificio e riduce la rovina a un pittoresco objet trouvé; la seconda, al contrario, considera quella stessa storia chiedendosi quale possa essere il suo ruolo nel presente. Questo progetto per Torre Rinalda a Lecce – una torre d’avvistamento costruita nel XVI secolo ora in rovina – indaga la seconda opzione, dove il vecchio edificio ispira quello nuovo generando uno slittamento semantico che può essere chiamato “risematizzazione”.
Over the last two centuries, as a conscious culture of preservation developed, the notion of ruins has greatly polarized the opinion of architects. The pro-restoration camp considers ruins a fragment to be used for rebuilding lost structures, whereas supporters of conservation view them as the end of a building's life cycle. While these positions stem from opposite mindsets, they share the belief that they reflect a fundamental truth: for restorers, the truth of a building’s original wholeness; for conservators, the truth of the passing of time. What both positions have in common is the view that ruins are a testament to the past. However, ruins are more than that and, in many ways, different. They possess an oft-ignored evocative power that can give rise to a structure different from the original one. In other words, they can come back to life in a different form. This transformation can be of two kinds: the first kind ignores the history of the building and reduces its ruins to the status of a picturesque objet trouvé. The second kind, on the contrary, takes that very history into account, asking what role it can have in the present. This project for Torre Rinalda in Lecce — a watch tower built in the 16th century that now lies in ruins—uses the latter approach, where the old building inspires the new one by generating a semantic shift that can be named “resemantization”.
The abandonment of buildings or entire territories is often interpreted as the outcome of seemingly spontaneous processes of demographic decline, economic crisis, or the functional obsolescence of the built environment. This paper proposes an alternative interpretation, arguing that abandonment should be understood not as a residual condition but also as the outcome of the political production of spacerawing on an analysis of disused public assets and recent transformations in urban policy in Italy, the paper argues that abandonment functions as a mechanism of territorial governance, producing social vulnerability and spatial availability. This availability is subsequently captured by extractive processes of real-estate and financial valorisation. The progressive withdrawal of the state, the decline in public maintenance capacity, and the financialisation of collective assets delineate an apparently dual geography that is, in fact, deeply unified, in which depopulating inland areas and cities under intense real-estate pressure represent convergent outcomes of the same transformation in the relationship between the public sphere, territory, and dwelling.
Public real estate assets can be considered as a layered repository of collective values generated by various long-term processes. These processes reflect a system of intertwining institutional policies and socio-economic developments that can be observed both at the macro and micro scale . Vastness, Variety and Variability are the main characteristics that hinder satisfactory management. The general state of preservation and use of public real estate, aggravated by the prevailing era of construction (boomer buildings), transforms it into a white elephant an inconvenient legacy rather than a real opportunity. After decades of government’s efforts and due to recent EU directives, our country is currently undergoing a methodological renewal to manage public buildings, distinguishing between instrumental goods, those producing an income, and unused assets. This contribution is the result of reflections and design experiments carried out over the past twenty years in the academic field. It departs from a sector-specific approach, proposing a key to understand public real estate that provides a unified basis for a flexible approach. To address the technical, procedural, and ethical dimensions that shape and continuously transform public real estate as a common good, the paper adopts the four components of any technological products-hardware, software, and the technology support network as an integrated analytical framework.
Abandoned industrial areas represent a potential mediation between city and nature, places where the plant world has progressively reclaimed both built and open spaces, offering us a rich and evocative imagery, which is fascinating and destabilizing. The poetics of abandonment, combined with the spatial quality that characterizes these real cathedrals of labor, represent two subtle values that legitimize their permanence over time; these are fragile qualities, often unintentionally jeopardized by redevelopment interventions, by the need to repurpose spaces, sometimes destroying their aura, their fascination, and their emotional engagement with the users. The term liminal space is borrowed from psychology to offer an alternative perspective on the redevelopment of industrial heritage, an internal focus that sees humans as an integral part of the environment, a fundamental indicator in determining the ecological value of a regeneration project.
