Second life

This article was originally published in Domus 964 / December 2012

Skeletons: industrial sheds, unfinished concrete frameworks, incomplete infrastructure, abandoned farmhouses and barns. All these elements tell the story of a wild and exhilarating ride towards a necessary modernity and an unfinished revolution that has left many casualties in its wake. Today, these victims have turned out to be a widespread problem that is difficult to deal with. There's nothing sublime in the sensations we feel every time we look carefully at the mass of built fragments generated by the postwar economic boom and subsequent decades, which outlined the postcards of a new, inescapable landscape. Little good would come of a moral stance veiled by a perilous sense of melancholy. That kind of approach would rather reset everything and instantly wipe away the powerful and paradoxical results of an entire society that simply wanted to be modern and advanced, like the rest of the Western world, but hadn't yet reached full maturity nor acquired the means of managing this incredible wealth of energy.

For Italy, the 1900s was a wild and overwhelming century in which a mass of new individuals sought and built their piece of paradise and personal well-being. They did so without calculating the powerful consequences and impact that millions of balconies and hundreds of "family-size factories" would have on Italy's fragile, narrow territory. And now the party is over, we find ourselves with a table that was unnecessarily set for too many guests, with waste we don't know how to dispose of, and with the annoying collective hangover of a population that has consumed energy, land, cultures and resources at a rate it now regrets.

However, this might all turn out to be a great opportunity for Italian architecture and its tarnished culture, as well as its related economy (which is experiencing a structural crisis), and universities lacking genuinely strategic projects. This world of waste could become a testing ground to kick-start a different phase of territorial regeneration, acting as a bridgehead for an entire continent struggling with similar problems. Starting from the uncompromising fight regarding the consumption of new territory, we can only note that, today, the true resources for work and experimentation are to be found in the thousands of concrete skeletons, underused buildings and abandoned wrecks awaiting new, visionary and courageous ideas. This doesn't imply mega-projects — which would have neither the resources nor the political and idealistic impetus to be carried through. Rather, it is a question of providing different administrative and design tools in order to stimulate a detailed regeneration of all those useful but neglected fragments spread throughout Italy, perhaps along with an equally courageous project to demolish the most indigestible waste and bring about a return to nature.

Today we are experiencing a decisive step forward in both scale and mindset as we go from the traditional formula of replacing and restoring buildings — which has brought success and vitality to Italy's historical town centres — to the more complex and widespread processes of reconstructing and regenerating existing buildings on a metropolitan scale. We should thus witness a significant transition, especially concerning the typologies and quality of the structures to be addressed in terms of architectural design. This jump to the territorial scale would in no way impair Italian architecture's cultural identity — which skilfully mixes qualities of space, hierarchies of places, the human scale, control of materials and care when working with limited resources. In Italy, over the last 15 years we have been able to identify a series of experiments that represent another way to build an alternative approach to traditional tools.

A subtle trace of potentially viable individual research can be found in the reinterpretation of metropolitan suburbs by groups such as Stalker, A12, Cliostraat and Multiplicity This approach can be crossed with the visionary power applied to abandoned artefacts represented in drawings by Beniamino Servino and Cherubino Gambardella, passing via "skeleton renewal" projects in Milan presented by studio Albori (Emanuele Almagioni, Giacomo Borella and Francesca Riva) at the XI Venice Biennale, but also studies for densifying the outskirts of Bolzano carried out by Metrogramma. These perhaps represent the most extreme experimental scenarios in counterpoint to a more realistic and basic dimension of construction, which is producing an increasing demand for projects that always start from existing structures. Having been recently constructed, and often of low quality, they can serve as a solid foundation for interesting conversions.

This Italian phenomenon is illustrated by three projects with similar backgrounds but distant geographical locations — recently completed by Gambardellarchitetti (Cherubino Gambardella and Simona Ottieri) in the hills between the gulfs of Gaeta and Sperlonga; by studio Albori in Ispra, in the province of Varese; and by Laboratorio Permanente and Sylos Labini Ingegneri Associati near Bari. Firstly, all three opportunities arose from the redesign of existing structures: a reinforced concrete skeleton on the hills overlooking the sea; a decrepit barn on Lake Maggiore; and the former home of Bari's airport director, awaiting a new use. Physical and administrative constraints became the common path that all the designers negotiated with great proficiency, each following their own personal obsessions, but shaping buildings that are truly new and imbued with notable sensitivity. Of course, their individual backgrounds also come into play. The project in Bari by Laboratorio Permanente, a studio founded in 2010 by Nicola Russi and Angelica Sylos Labini, was effectively their first commission, while the two houses by Gambardella and Albori are part of much denser bodies of work.

Distant in terms of both geography (Naples; Milan) and cultural references (Ponti, Hejduk and Neapolitan postwar architecture; Umberto Riva and Álvaro Siza), for years Gambardella and Albori have nurtured special attention for the subtle and popular qualities of architecture without architects. From Pagano to Bernard Rudofsky, these qualities have fascinated many generations in search of a house that is modern, warm and within everyone's reach. The experimental, almost audacious passion for materials and their possible combinations is another element that brings them together (as well as the very personal and original use of drawing), even though there is apparently an abyss between the impoverished and vibrantly colourful wood used by the Milanese studio, and the worn and ruined metal and ceramics favoured by the Neapolitan practice.

In each case, however, the design solution is based on the insistent use of a single material. The concrete skeleton of the house by Gambardella is enclosed with a deformed prism finished with white craquelure ceramic tiles "floating" on a thin orange plinth. The barn by Albori, meanwhile, is treated as a structural woodshed surrounding the entire house, especially on the side exposed to the sun. These small and powerful works make ironic and radical use of materials, transforming the two homes into pleasant paradoxes in which it is nice to live.

The case of the building in Bari is different. Designed for use as a kindergarten, it started out as an existing structural frame in reinforced concrete that was then astutely reconfigured as two distinct volumes stacked on top of each other. The result is an interesting relationship between the low, intimate courtyard below and the roof promenade above. The typological and organisational intelligence compensates for some of the overall weakness in design language, an understandable consequence given such a delicate and compromised first commission.

It is nonetheless interesting to approach these works due to the domestic and visionary intelligence and ability with which these designers have addressed such a widespread issue in the Italian landscape. Indeed, in the coming years it is destined to become the burden, or the delight, of an interesting part of Italy's architectural heritage. Luca Molinari, architect(@lucamolinari4)