The ready-made of existing building stock

From the beginning of the new century, the culture of architectural design seems in a state of permanent crisis, if related to the times and places of a durably experimental epoch. This anomaly must not to be perceived negatively because can represent the premise (the gamble?) for future growth of discipline and, simultaneously, is a bearer of development potential for the contemporary cities. At the same time, it represents an unprecedented and dynamic adaptation process for the existing building stock built after Second World War, also through the reworked version of known strategies in the history of modern architecture. Very often, meaningful examples of this design approach are found in negligible areas, to all appearances, of the contemporary urban fabric, and can transform social, environmental, and spatial obstacles into supports for the people, for the environment and, also, for architecture. And it is in this constellation of terrain vague that it is possible to activate multidisciplinary synergies capable of supporting ambitious programs of reconversion, and to inaugurate new scenarios by reusing existing structures with greater creativity and awareness. The key assumption for implementing effective design strategies seems to be to consider a “second time” in the life of buildings, after that of the function for which they were built, which is configured as the time of modification, adaptation to new uses of materials and constructions. These concepts appear to be relevant as regards the issues of sustainability of the production cycle and reuse of resources. At the same time, the design orientation is acquiring an aesthetic dimension that establishes the value of the object linked, essentially, to ready-made operations who transforming ordinary buildings into artifacts with a renewed architectural worth. As is known, in history often happened who the ruins of architecture have been used to develop a new building. «Roman temples provided useful columns for Christian churches» says Theo Crosby in Architecture, the sense of the city (1971), to underline how, the practice of manipulating the built, though with motivations and outcomes of different from time to time, it has always been present in architecture. In the case of contemporary building stock, the tools for redevelopment not limited to change of intended use or to the recycling of materials but allow a morphological qualities redefinition of the built that affects, inevitably its urban role.