Festival dell'architettura

Urban regeneration should focus on a methodological and interdisciplinary approach, entrenched in the territories. Therefore, this paper promotes specific design actions, based on the use of reversible, low tech and low impact building systems. The “integrate” procedures focus on an “adaptive maintenance” (with character: “preventive” and “corrective”) able to “update” the architectural objects in order to restore high typological and performance standard, qualitatively increased.

The theme of urban and territorial regeneration is today crucial – inside and outside the universities – not only for the architectural and urban disciplines, but also for the economic growth of our Country. Personally – as architects and professors – it appears fundamental to begin with the definition of an interdisciplinary methodological approach to face the problem. It is therefore necessary to promote a dialogue between different actors and an interaction of different skills, able to produce new virtuous forms of hybridization collegially involved in the urban regeneration practice.

The instruments of the different institutions (framework agreements, third parties agreements, etc.) already allow undertaking knowledge interchanges between research centres and territorial authorities, without risks of overlapping roles. The university indeed does not operate in the professional world, but in all those complex situations that require articulated services, not easily available on the marked, and/or advanced experimentations and innovative techniques and procedures.

Our Country, in times of crisis, shows different and dramatic forms of dyscrasia affecting the urban environment. The lack of jobs, the disposal and neglect of the productive areas, the degradation of the peripheries, could be exorcized with the requalification and reactivation of all those buildings that are not adequate anymore to satisfy the living requirements of the users and the regulations, with an energetic, seismic and typological retrofit. The urban regeneration would represent for the local community a sort of reparation (both in terms of mending than of compensation) of the spaces unapproachable for the accessibility, the fruition, the life.

In other texts we repeatedly assert that the urban regeneration is not a utopia, a “no-place” (ou-topos), but a real “place” (strongly dependent from building characteristics and recurrent performance deficits) impossible to deny because inconvenient, and because it would impossible to replace the remains. Utopia can instead become “eutopia” (eu-topos), or many “good places”, defining guidelines and organic and sustainable techniques, also economically, on the strand of European theorizations and realizations. Architecture has the strength and the duty to operate an aesthetical redemption, producing a new urban quality, but this will be possible only through professionals with an appropriate project culture and able to develop a more mature vision of the profession inside the civitas.

The capitalistic and speculative processes produced massive wastes of land and constructions, which, once not used anymore, are demolished producing waste and dissipating energy. The possibility to profitably repair is something forgotten too often. The firm belief of a greater convenience of the so-called “radical construction”, which demolishes in order to rebuild, is indeed of a short-sighed utilitarianism. The advantages of a regenerative process based on reuse and substitution of small parts, are represented also by the revaluation of professionals producing building techniques based on technological excellences and artisan knowledge1.

Italy is still at the first steps of the systemic studies about urban regeneration, with episodic interventions lacking of coordination and showing a heterogenic overview of techniques and tactics, in which there is mixture of demolitions, interventions on the public space, on the building morphology, with modest results in terms of integration2.

The complexity of the skills required today should necessarily lead to methodologies allowing a multi-purposes approach, never self-referential. To convince an institution (and even more a private stakeholder) that “remodelling” a building, or a group of buildings, is more convenient than demolishing tout-court, is an articulated and complex operation, during which more than showing others’ virtuous practices3 often difficult to find, it is necessary to list actual possibilities reachable also without the modification of the current regulations. It is impelling to transfer these new competences specializing the Master’s courses throughout an aware formative process, in which the disciplines are connected in functional sequences. I do not refer to “professionalizing” courses but to directed forms of knowledge towards an integrate approach able to lead to students to develop pilot-projects from which deducing a classification of congruent types and materials for possible interventions, relative both to residential buildings and working places.

Experiments in this direction have been undertaken by the research unit4 I coordinate at the Department of Civil Engineering, Architecture, Territory, Environment and Mathematics (DICATAM) at the University of the Study of Brescia. The unit experimented an operative practice that we called “adaptive maintenance”, on the strand of Robert Kroneburg’s definition (2007), based on the use of building systems that are reversible, low tech, with low impact and able to convey a renewed relation between typology and technology. It is an “integrate” system of building works capable to update, technologi-cally and typologically, the architectural objects thanks to standardised and inter-changeable technologies and building systems. This with a dual character: “preventive”, to avoid the degradation of the constructions, and “corrective” to reintegrate a typological and performance standard qualitatively improved.

This practice is applied in two fields of intervention:

• new design practices for the sustainable requalification of the residential habitat related to the integrate regeneration of the constructions and their contexts (architectural reshaping, energy efficiency and structural safety)5.

• formulation of experimental scenarios for the recovery of industrial and/or dis-missed areas.

The research group developed a technological device defined “adaptive exoskeleton”, a structural system morphologically comparable to a stiffening framework, external to the existing building and collaborating with it to optimize the structural response (seismic) and the energetic performances and to improve the quality of the internal spaces. A sort of technological superstructure that includes new services and seismic devices. The adaptive exoskeleton exploits dry and reversible technological solutions, in a perspective of resource saving and recycling of construction materials, in order to suggest a concrete alternative to the building substitution which produces a consistent environmental stress. It can include new independent “objects” (rooms for the expansion of the apartments, solar greenhouses, winter gardens, terraces, etc.) realized avoiding expensive modification of the houses. It can host new distributive elements in occasion of typological renewal of the entire building or allow the realization of new elevations (with new residential units or common structures) that, if sold or rented, could cover the costs of the intervention of requalification, such as for the Dutch Housing Associations. This operative practice can be used also for the recovery of degraded buildings and can be modified over the time in relation to the different geographical, climate and urban contexts. The adaptive exoskeleton has the objective to prolong the life cycle of the artefact thanks to the progressive adaptation, leading to the reduction of the environmental impact of the building itself distributed over a longer time span.

In a real estate market, such as the Italian one, in which «it will become necessary (or it will be imposed by the trend of the market itself) to redefine a new “theory of the value” from the quality of the building and of the context»6, which is inclined to privilege the substitution strategies ignoring the possibility of recovery, maintenance and regenera-tion of the existing heritage, it is making its way an awareness, with a focus on the en-ergetic and environmental resources, promoting a more evolved strategy of intervention on the strand of ecologist policies adopted by the international community.

We are convinced that these operative modes will be able to reduce consistently the waste and to develop tools able to generate urban quality and to improve the environ-mental contexts working, as Nicolas Bourriaud (2002) inaugurating the transgressive restoration of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris by Anne Lacaton and Jean Philippe Vassal, just with “post-production” modalities. In summary, ours is just a modest proposal to ap-proach the smart city.

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