La prefabbricazione in Italia nel secondo dopoguerra. Temi di tutela e conservazione

Conservation and a new, compatible and sustainable use of the extensive heritage produced in the post-war period, especially the buildings produced by the prefabrication and industrialisation techniques developed by the construction industry, require the definition of new approaches to deal with this issue. The specific architectural and structural characteristics of this heritage – experimental prototypes, housing estates, industrial complexes – have demonstrated its fragility as time passes. The problem of conserving or converting these buildings is not only a question of decay, but also of the meaning and value that a building acquires (or loses) over time. In the collective imagination, nothing suggests featureless, blighted suburbs more than the concept of ‘prefabricated architecture’. Instead, the subject is highly complex and detailed. From the end of the Second World War to the mid-1970s, the architectural heritage built using prefabrication techniques in Italy was characterised by a process that differed from what was practised in other European countries. In the immediate post-war period, the debate focused on the transition from theoretical studies regarding these new construction systems to experimentation, and finally to the construction of the first housing estates in the early Fifties, when it was widely understood that the themes of prefabrication and the industrialisation of construction had to be correlated with those of architecture, economics and urban planning. While housing production in Italy opted for systems that were already tried and tested elsewhere, research and experimentation continued thanks to the attention paid to design by architects/industrial designers, who made this theme central to their architectural production, such as Marco Zanuso and Angelo Mangiarotti, or the multi-faceted architect Gino Valle. Factors such as the risk of making exclusively utilitarian alterations to these buildings, dictated by purely economic and financial concerns, decay, structural problems, new uses, changes to planning regulations, innovations in standards of comfort, social changes and a changing perception of these buildings could lead, in a relatively short time, to the obliteration of an important phase in the history of the transformation of our cities and territory or to the loss of important milestones in Italian architectural research. The aim of this paper is to reflect on the challenge of identifying methods for managing the improvements that are now necessary, which in some cases have been underway for some time now, while preserving the meaning and value of this tangible and intangible cultural heritage.