Overwriting the Urban Palimpsest. A Regenerative Structure for Historic Public Spaces and Buildings: Insertion, Overwriting, and Grafting

The reality of the project we are operating within is increasingly fragmented by the restricted viewpoint of the summation of disciplinary specifics which, starting from the post-war years, saw the separation of the various scales of the project (architecture and urban design, planning and protection) and the clashing of expertise (the design of the new and responsibility for the old). The palimpsest of signs and meanings that time has layered on built forms, instead, reopens questions of meaning that do not end in a conservation based on the selection of values that are historically transient, but need to be untangled in the complex relationship between history, site and design. As identity of places is a dynamic process of unending construction and reinvention, the dialectic relationship between the architectural project and conservation-restoration needs to be taken back to the concreteness of built facts to which they both belong, to revive the founding role of the old in configuring both architectural language, layered morphologies and ideas of the city. To introduce the case study the paper discusses the role of authenticity in materiality and the changing values of the old in relation to the permanent signification of architecture; the dialectic between the old and the new as a specific theme of architecture where the test bench is the project as a cognitive and multi-scale act around which to build “case by case” the rules for intervention; the Italian tradition of the urban project, discussing the need for a stratigraphic reading and a description language to understand the urban palimpsest and provide an overall multi-scale strategy for architecture, public space and urban landscape as an entireness. The series of projects for an old town, northward Milan, exemplifies a design-led approach to heritage and Historic Urban Landscape in which reading tools, conservation and design are shown in their mutual relationship. Integrating conservation to insertion, overwriting and grafting, the sequence of designs give shape to a “regenerative structure” that enhances as a system and for public use a set of introverted Baroque buildings and spaces along a historical promenade, re-centring the city around its brownfield core.