Advanced knowledge techniques and proposals for a compatible reuse and enhancement of a disjointed urban area: Villa Bossi in Busto Arsizio and its surroundings.

Villa Bossi is located in the historical centre of Busto Arsizio (Varese), a city north-west of Milan and today an important industrial and commercial centre, densely urbanised. The urban development of Busto Arsizio had a great impulse starting from the nineteenth century, due to the cotton industry. The Villa, built in 1850 in a closed courtyard, today is inserted in a heterogeneous urban environment, characterized by a mixture of functions and discordant buildings. Moreover, the perception of the Villa is now altered: the twentieth century demolitions have in fact left space for a large unresolved urban void all around the Villa, which today shows as the main façades two services fronts. Apparently, the building is the result of a single neoclassical project but it preserves traces of previous ones, investigated with accurate analysis of the geometry (using laser scanning techniques, photogrammetric and direct) the materials, the structures and their state of conservation. The activities of urban scale analysis, using geo-referenced historical maps, photos and historical views, have allowed to identify the specificities of the existing, essential to formulate a proposal for conservation, reuse and enhancement of the entire area. The aim of this paper is to show the results of this articulated research, both on urban and architectonica scale, in order to plan a new use both of the Villa and of an entire portion of the urban landscape, ri-connecting the various parts.