Reuse or Recycle?

The definition of designing strategies capable of describing a growing hierarchy of alteration of the pre-existing, and of defining a progression of the degrees of transformation, leads us to distinguish different categories of manipulation and different actuators. However, it is important to evaluate whether it still makes sense to distinguish the restoration project of a building from the design of a building itself or not. Since it is possible to encounter, within an urban scenario that could be idealized as an immense ruin, unfinished and abandoned fragments that coexist, as the waste of the city that is built (or tries to do so), the historical ruins of the city, identified in archaeological sites or in the ruins of the historical monuments, as well as the ruins of the late Modern Period. It is still necessary to distinguish between restorers, the sole custodians of the knowledge of certain techniques capable of scientifically solving the conflicts that each restoration intervention entails, and the "creative" architects. It is a consideration that invests every scale of the project where the action of reuse, intended as the will to confirm the dominance of the existing values, has clearly prevailed on the possibility of regenerating urban portions and architectural bodies with a recycling action in which the existing becomes useful material for a completely renewed project. The action of recycling, as well as many other actions belonging to other cultural areas in which elements from different sources blend, where the new coexists with the ancient, is a type of binder, a cultural glue, a virus, that informs and supports contemporary culture.