Advancements in research for buildings recovery A Laboratory experience: prototyping a system of vegetated closure

The paper discusses the role that architectural technology can play to contrast ancient settlements' vulnerability, promoting shifts towards innovation, involving not only means and tools, but knowledge, rules, processes. The principle of ensuring the "conservation of resources", drives an experimental design approach aimed to foster the development of a vegetated closure system for the recovery of buildings' envelopes. Assumptions underlying the design and prototyping experience is that the construction sector, is sensitive to evolutionary innovations rather than radical ones. Thirty years of experience on existing buildings, with the recourse to undifferentiated products, moved the focus of research into the need to anticipate specific solutions, with the awareness that new technologies for ancient systems should be bearers of specific performances, rather than of stereotypical images. In the scenario of the third millennium, built environment recovery requires products and techniques able to reconcile the demands of preservation and transformation with the imperatives of cleaner production. The paper returns the conceptual work done by a team of architects from the Laboratory of Recovery and Maintenance at the University of Naples Federico II, for the drafting of a vegetated closure, developed in collaboration with the inventors of the polyurethane foam Hypucem from the Institute for Composite and Biomedical Materials - IMCB - CNR. The two teams presented their work at the First National Conference Polyurethane Rigid - Thermal Insulation and Energy Saving, Castelnuovo del Garda, Varese, 2013, resulting second prize winners.