Restoration and the future: the visionary legacy of Andrea Bruno

“Transformation is the only guarantee of preserving memory through architecture,” said Andrea Bruno (1931–2025) in a 2014 interview with Il Giornale dell’Arte, on the occasion of his retrospective in Venice.
And in that powerful one-liner, the architect – who passed away this July at the age of 94 – managed to encapsulate decades of a globally scaled career, one that brought about a genuine revolution in the way we think about restoration and the valorization of cultural heritage. At a time when “restoration,” “contemporary,” and “technology” – let alone high-tech – were only tolerated as long as they didn’t appear together, especially not in public, his projects, which complemented the historic with a distinguishable and dialoguing “new,” soon became benchmarks. Born and educated in Turin, graduated from Politecinico di Torino, Bruno would soon take his work far beyond his homeland, teaching in Milan and Belgium, and operating across Europe, North Africa, and Asia. Since 1974, he served as a consultant for UNESCO, a role that led him to work on studies for the preservation of the Minaret of Jam and the famous Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan, destroyed by the Taliban in 2001.

His restoration projects always write a new chapter in the stories of the buildings they touch: more than a stylistic mark, they reflect a relational approach to the past. Consider the Brigittines in Brussels, where a Baroque church is doubled by a contemporary twin to be reborn as a performing arts center; the renovation and set-up of the MAO (Museum of Oriental Art) in Turin; or the restoration of the Citadel of Corte in Corsica, now a university campus. But two of his projects, two of his most meaningful “returns home”, stand out as landmarks in such a rich architectural journey.
One is Castello di Rivoli, Italy’s first contemporary art museum, restored between 1979 and 1984. This was a project involving an illustrious unfinished building: a Savoy residence begun by Filippo Juvarra and never completed. Bruno would not hide its incompleteness, he rather celebrated it, through different layers of intervention. Two rooms were restored almost philologically, while the truncated wings were completed with new steel-and-glass vestibules and roofs, a full-height suspended metal staircase, and a now-iconic detail: a small cantilevered capsule jutting from the top floor above the entrance.

Then comes the house-studio he designed for artist Ezio Gribaudo in a hillside neighborhood of Turin, exploring the same principle of dialogue, but at an urban scale. It’s a study in brutalism as a relationship between sculptural intervention and the surrounding historic landscape: a conversation with the outside world, opening onto a sequence of near-painterly views as one ascends through the exposed-concrete cubic volumes; but also a conversation within, where the entrance features a sculptural wooden stair-bookcase asserting its presence as a protagonist in the domestic space. It’s a refined interpretation of brutalism as a conversation with people and place, one that we also find in the Italian Embassy Bruno designed in Kabul. And one that would keep standing as a reference for future architects tasked with deciding how architecture can carry on living through history.