Rewriting Architecture: Methodological Principles for Architectural Heritage Reconstruction

ABSTRACT: The study here displayed deals with the relationship between project and landscape through the technique of rewriting in contexts and conditions of emergency where war events compromise and mutilate the architectural heritage. In particular, the rewriting process is here identified as a generative technique capable to convert a mutilated structure, not efficiently recoverable with conservation and restoration techniques, into a general syntagmatic element or into a group of syntagmatic elements ascribable to the original one through a transformation process of the landscape and natural environment. The architecture of the collapsed cities damaged by the war represents a preferential experimental field. That situation leads to reflect not only on the generative conditions of the urban structure's elements, but it is also fundamental to understand the idea beneath them, working in continuity with the transformation of its physical structure. In the production of the city's forms, the element that intervenes in the philosophical and aesthetic field in the creation process is action that balances the creative gesture between what was and gives it back coherently to what will be, in its physical substance and in its inclination to transform itself in something else, through the fundamental recognition of an existing structure, formally composed even if compromised. In other words, this rewriting process entails the recognition of the current architectural heritage in order to assume it critically, trying to give back the invariant elements that characterized the permanence as an incorruptible factor of continuity in time. A tangible example of application concerns some areas subjected to war conflicts, which have caused a huge damage to the architectural heritage of cities. The developing of a critic reconstruction methodology in these contexts represents a fundamental need for the safeguard of the architectural heritage and cultural identity of populations involved in war conflicts.   KEYWORDS: Cultural heritage, architectural reconstruction, critical urban transformatio