An atlas of the "architectural project for existing buildings". Towards a definition of founding design action.

This contribution illustrates the results of a research project focused on the creation of an atlas of the ???architectural project for existing buildings???. This inventory aims to present itself as a rational and critical analytical instrument, allowing an overall vision of the various, current philosophical-practical approaches, adopted throughout different geographical areas and concerning projects of rehabilitation and adaptive reuse of historic buildings, through an extensive mapping of case studies, selected from over two hundred projects realised over the last 15 years. This atlas is not, however, merely an instrument of knowledge, but, above all, an opportunity to rethinking of the idea of intervention on the existing building, emphasizing the need to combine the readability and comprehensibility of the building in its historical evidence to the reality and the redefinition of its functional characteristics, with the purpose of an renewed use, with particular attention to his issues of habitable space. For this reason, the Atlas offers a critical reading of the innovative projects that reveal the presence of arrays of recurrent conceptual attitudes identified as "design actions". These actions put highlights in convergent and founding mode, as well as complementary attitudes, sometimes even antithetical, present in the process of the social, cultural and economic buildings revitalizing. These actions are: - ???approach???, an act that implies an awareness of the relation between the original body of the building and its new complementary and/or defining elements; - ???addition??? that reveals a reciprocal need for physical contact that, albeit abolishing the principle of independence, preserves the explicit reading of the added elements, describing the building as a whole generated by the co-presence of original and new portions; - ???insertion??? that is the one most intrinsically connected to internal design, because everything is realised inside the volume of the pre-existing architecture, according to the principle of inclusion. - ???superimposition??? that represents the most intense moment of comparison between the characteristics of the pre-existing building and its reconfiguration through a design voluntarily oriented towards an act of over-writing.