Design “reactivity” for the enhancement of the built environment. New models of living in abandoned office buildings

The contribution proposes strategies for the convertibility of the disused heritage, in which hybridisation, temporary functionality and use become generative factors to support changes in requirements over time. The design criteria: modularity and its articulations, dry construction technology, flexibility, with the relative choice of technical, techno-typological and procedural solutions, respond to a predictive need of the project as a degree of freedom that allows transformations. The work provides tools and operational models to rethink rehabilitation as an action of continual improvement over time, which goes beyond the concept of reversibility (as debated on an international scale) to achieve continuous convertibility, recognition of heritage as a resource. The design approach interprets the intervention on the existing building not only as a static qualitative adjustment (functional, spatial, physical...) but as an action that reformulates the life cycle and the 'reactivity' of the building to future changes, through peculiar construction solutions. The conditions illustrated configure a design result adapted to the dynamics of demand, to multiple categories of users and to the interests of the stakeholders, triggering interventions with a social value. Through design simulations and the assessment of technical-economic feasibility, design models and strategies are then inferred that are capable of generating a new use of living space, to guarantee hygiene, health and wellbeing, and which can be replicated on different application contexts in variable ways.