Archetypes of Architectural Rewriting Technique

When the architecture of the city requires a design action which aims at transforming its physical structure, it is fundamental not only the development of a critical reflection on the morphological characters of the context, trying to identify those recurrent typological and formal elements in the pre-existence environment, but also the recognition of some methodological principles suitable for a modification process of the urban fabric. This short essay intends to deal with the relationship between pre-existence and new intervention from the point of view of the architectural project and, more specifically, of architectural composition techniques. The study of some experimental practices adopted in the rewriting modalities of a written text, called transtextuality techniques, suggests a possible methodological direction in dealing with the problem of how to operate and build in the historical city. Here is the hypothesis that architecture, like a literary text, can be rewritten from a textual reorganization of its constitutive elements. This happens when the project is the result of a generative process aimed at transforming, displacing and reallocating the elements of an earlier architecture into a new narrative system, building a second architecture through their synthesis. Therefore, one would wonder whether it is possible to identify, even in the architectural field, a series of recurrent operations in those cases in which the project tends to transform and, thus, rewrite the physical structure of a previous building or urban system. On the other hand, when the structural and figurative characters of architecture are the outcome of an act of transformation extended over time, the city can be conceived as a stratification process, similar to the idea of a palimpsest, in which a heterogeneous set of architectures, belonging to different historical moments, coexist in the same frame of space and time. In these cases, the rewriting process of the urban form depends on a superimposition and integration of new elements within the pre-existing structure. Specifically, the research here displayed aims at defining an overall picture of the phenomenon of rewriting through the analysis of the compositional procedures adopted by some archetypal cases of this generative technique, where the design process assumes its creative factors from a dialectical relationship between invention and memory, tradition and innovatio