Evolutive Dwelling: A Systemic, Open and Sustainable Approach to the Rehabilitation of the Italian Mass Housing Stock. The Case Study of the Open Building

The research works on the issue of the Italian mass housing, because it’s believed that housing is playing a key role in the current social and economic situation that involves the entire Country. The Italian mass housing sector is now experiencing a deep crisis in social and economic terms. It’s also living a strong contradiction. There is in fact a great demand for housing, which doesn’t receive an adequate response in terms of functionality and affordability, and at the same time a large, unused and obsolete building heritage, both as regards the new that the existing. This has inevitably bring to a paralysis of the construction sector and consequently of the construction industry. What we can see today in Italy, despite the goodness of the original intentions of the Big Plans of Sixties and Seventies, is in the most of cases a large building stock become prematurely obsolescent, with a life potential further reduced in the light of the recent regulations in terms of sustainability and energy efficiency, creating situations of precarious housing conditions, fertile ground for social and urban degradation. For this reason the research mainly focus itself on the rehabilitation of the existing building stock. The aims of the research is to investigate, on one hand potentiality and limitations of the Open Building approach applied to the prefabricated systems of the Italian housing of the Seventies, on the other hand a system and a hierarchy of components that can be industrialized and customized, and their interdependencies. This as a strategy for rehabilitation interventions. This can become a big ground of experimentation, able to give new rules and a new direction for the future, more efficient and sustainable, building construction. Furthermore it could be a ground of work able to boost the market of the industrialized building component.