Architettura della trasformazione: interpretare e ridisegnare lo spazio dall’interno / Architecture of transformation: interpretating and redesigning the space from the inside

The interventions of transformation, carried out within existing buildings, allow you to make some interesting considerations about the genesis of the project, through a non-linear but circular route, in which, at different times and with more or less importance depending on the circumstances, theoretical models and circumstances induced by the context, general views and extremely detailed definitions, functional problems and environmental influences are involved. The theme of the transformation of the existing building is undoubtedly of great relevance, in a so saturated environment as that of our cities and at a time in which the awareness of the need to recover the available resources is widespread. Moreover, from a disciplinary point of view, the transformation projects exemplify the theoretical and methodological sense of interior architecture, cultivated in the school I come from, and its meaningful and fundamental link with the “tout court” architecture, whose practice helps feeding not minor attitudes and feelings. The interior project cannot be reductively understood as a project of completion, but as an approach that, even when it happens within an existing space, is able to build the relationship between man and space, and to base the definition of the formal and spatial structures on it. It plays a foundational role and is able not only to feed a generative process which starts from the inside, as the greatest masters showed, but also to re-examine the relationship between casing and living-space, without denying their connection and highlighting how this can be the subject of a new foundation, thanks to the interventions of transformation of the existing. The way in which, in architecture, we can understand the project is not comparable to that in which it is interpreted by the exact sciences. That is an act of absolute foundation, since the architectural design, at any scale and in any field of application, always assumes pre-existing situations, both real and material, as the context in which it settles, and cultural, as traditions and ways of living. The interpretation of the project, as a search for a new absolute, which is the result of a conflict between before and after, cannot refer itself to the practice of architecture, where this opposition is dissolved in a continuous process of revision, caused by new demands posed by the culture and the people to whom it is addressed. The architectural design is therefore an act in progress, which is based on an existing situation, and may have a role of remembrance, projection and interpretation. In this sense, the architecture qualifies itself as hermeneutics. The interior design is, simultaneously, fragile in its material substance, but strong for its ability to affect the quality of living human. Especially when it flows from operations of transformation, adaptation or reuse of existing spaces, it moves following and interpreting the traces of the original structure, producing new realities, through the more or less slight manipulation of the places where it enters. The interior architecture is layered and changes itself, according to continuous processes of transformation, which are much faster than the urban dimension of the architecture itself. It clearly shows how impossible it is to fix the outcome of the projecting at a specific time and in a stable and immutable condition. This happens because, in responding to contingent and existential needs, it becomes part of contexts, which continually change. Each intervention is a change in the system it belongs to, which has in turn an impact on other parts of the boundary, changing their direction and inducing other changes, required by the need of adaptation. You can always check that the context, in which each project gets in, provides the necessary energy to the new project, even and especially, when its new identity develops according to an antagonist matrix. For the interior design, the metaphor used by Giampiero Bosoni seems particularly effective. He talks about "engagement", with respect to the transformations which, starting from the inside, produce, through a "gemmation", a new meaning, together with a new form, which shows itself also outside. It also involves the role, which that building, firstly transformed only from its inside, has towards the part of the city in which it stands. Starting from the inside, you can produce a different architecture, which responds to current demands and gives new life to the permanent values of the original architecture. In the architecture of the interior, the design process is immediately focused on the synthesis of formal and functional values and tectonic solutions. The design is a search tool that, thanks to the scale in which you work, defends the project from the risks of the extra-large size of contemporary architecture. They are the abstractness, the schizophrenic split between its different dimensions, and the loss of the physical and sensory experience of the architectural space. The design of the detail provides not only a clear indication of the construction processes, which is a fundamental step to translate an intuition into architectural form, but introduces also, in the project, the human, physical and cultural measure, and the ability to probe the quality and the areal density of the space, determined by the concrete materiality of the elements, it is actually made of. The comparison between two interventions, Casa Balboni by Carlo Scarpa and a renovation of an apartment by Vittoriano Viganò, both implemented within existing spaces, in historical different cities, seems interesting, in order to underline how the interior project succeeds, interpreting and using some important meanings of the place, in giving new sense and values to that space. Although expressing itself through different languages, they both belong, in my opinion, to a period of great interest, in which the fundamental message of modern thought is grown, accepting, without denials, the focus on the history lessons and on the reading of the tracks provided by the context. They are interventions that take, from this aspect, compositional principles and ideas, showing how some qualities and features of the site can feed the environmental quality of the more intimate space. In both examples it is clear that the handling and transforming project, which interprets and gives new life to existing spaces, makes them more responsive to current uses, in terms of performance or of taste, and re-establishes a sense, feeding itself on the context but also on the experimentation, starting from the inside but also from the outside, relying on a redefinition of the plant space, but also on the quality of the fine detail. Basically, it shows what "designing from the inside" means.