The Continuity of Context and History

Preservation Through The Transformation Of The Societa Umanitaria Building Complex

Thesis title:
THE CONTINUITY OF CONTEXT AND HISTORY. Preservation Through The Transformation Of The Societa Umanitaria Building Complex

Date of discussion:
15 December 2020

Students:
Tong Li, XuLiang Pan

Supervisor
Giulio Massimo Barazzetta

Professors of the Studio
Giulio Massimo Barazzetta (Architectural Design)
Rossana Gabaglio (Architectural Preservation)
Angela Silvia Pavesi (Technology and Design in BIM Environment)
Mauro E. Giuliani (Structural Design )
Luca A. Piterà (Building Services Design)
Lucia Toniolo (Materials for Preservations)

Abstract:
Preservation through the transformation of Società Umanitaria building complex.
“At first glance, nostalgia is a longing for a place, but actually it is a yearning for a different time – the time of our childhood, the slower rhythms of our dreams. In a broader sense, nostalgia is a rebellion against the modern idea of time, the time of history and progress.”

The Future of Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym
Generally, we live in a moment of extreme fascination with the past. We are so obsessed with the cultural art-crafts of ours recent past that the same phenomenon seems to parameter all aspects of culture production and definitely architecture. Attempts to reconstruct the past by forcing new projects to look like old ones or completely the other way round, generating a confusing chaotic cocktail of past and present.
In this project, we have an extension of the existing student housing, as the new demands required, and improve the public space with new internal order. We tried to be less obsessed with the ambition to affect the skyline of the city, the attention to preservation and more gernarlly to the reuse of existing urban fabrics lead us to a design which is less focused on form but more on histories, program, systems, materias and technologies.