Designing water. The paradigm of SPA architecture.Progettare l'acqua. Il paradigma dell'architettura termale.

The theme of resources represents a nodal topic of urban renewal in a logic targeting not only safeguard and conservation but also the creation of new opportunities from both an environmental and a social point of view. This applies to all the natural elements. Water has been since ever a primary resource, the essential requirement for the birth and the development of the cities: its presence has been conditioning both social and economic well-being of the population by even affecting morphological configurations, from the wider territorial scale, to the true urban systems, up to the smaller residential settlements. Spa towns and architecture, with their peculiarity, do represent privileged experimentation paradigms, realities which, more than others, allow to record the trends of the fast social and environmental changes. The cultural and discipline scenario characterizing the current debate about environment, cities, and architecture, justifies specialist deepenings which, in paradigmatic terms, highlight the evolution of thought concerning the modification of the territory such as it has been forged in the recent years, as well as the theoretical-operational transformation of the instruments dedicated to the stewardship of environmental resources, thus favouring the delimitation of possible solutions apt to deal with the qualitative inflection that may be noticed both in the urban and sub-urban contexts of our own realities. The exploration of thematic domains concerning the relationship between architecture and healthcare and well-being places enables to approach spatial, functional, and technological conceptualizations, which were born simultaneously with the birth of man and are aimed at satisfying the innate willingness to ensure the society and the individual, high, lasting, and ethically sharable quality life performances. Research and design actions run after one another, based on designing concepts that are aimed not only at pointing out aspects of spatial and constructive nature, but also at underlining in a wide form the cultural, historical, and innovation roots that every transformation phenomenon implies. Mastering the spa theme, in its symbolic, architectural, and managerial assumptions, is the incipit enabling to foster and spur those cultural and urban regeneration actions which the society and the places it resides in call for with declared vigour, complexity, and articulation. The profound anthropological and scientific background expressed by the theme, accompanied by new economic and productive needs, does corroborate the meaning of an investigation aimed at recovering the values that spa architecture has been embodying since ever within the anthropized territory and the relation systems that set in within it. The work is developed through theoretical and designing dissertations, to get to the definition of the main lines apt to the planning and strategic management of the system, through integrated and transversal discipline contributions, in a logic targeting cultural, environmental, and material resources valorization. Territory, architecture, and technology constitute the reading keys of a phenomenon showing an evident evolution, starting from the historical reasons behind spa architecture to reach the definition management policies and government of territorial systems, through up-to-date techniques aimed at the analysis, valorization, and promotion of water as a cultural asset. Spa architecture, its spaces, the representations ensuing from it, show new designing abilities, the testimonies of a renewed concept of modern well-being that the contemporary society is claiming for. The work intends to investigate the new architectural, functional, technological, and managerial scenarios concerning both the spa system and its architectures, by analytically exploring the designing, construction, and management steps of a process of redefinition of contexts and places featuring high complexity and experiencing strong transformation, in order to contribute to the current spatial and social regeneration action. Territorial and district domains represent the horizons the architecture of spa well-being is confronted with, introducing both opportunities and logics for the physical, economical, and social regeneration and valorization of a dynamically evolving reality: analysing the relation among spas, water, and architecture means coping with one of the founding subjects that lay at the basis of the history of the city through the new reading of a cultural infrastructure as expression of contemporariness. The spa town constitutes a palimpsest of the rites and of the history of civilization: its architectures, their characters, narrate its identity. Water is the element acting as the protagonist in such a screenplay.