HISTORICAL SCIENTIFIC AND EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCHES AIMED AT FINDING NEW TECHNIQUES AND INSTRUMENTS TO RECOVER

The “building recovery” has been the key point of various talks that, since the ‘60s, have regarded planning and urban landscaping. The reinforced concrete-ruled XXth century has generated buildings that have resulted technologically flawed, if not altogether unattractive. These flaws can be justified by premature use of certain techniques (not will-known the necessity of historical research), but this can not justify the modern degraded townships, the loss of local urban characteristics and the environmental unbalancing. Where sites are of XXth century cultural heritage? Which are the methodologies for documenting and managing? This research is aimed at analysing new techniques and materials to address these problems. It also aims to establish the requirements of a reclaim plan. The case of study: Villaseta quarter Inside the debate explained it is interesting to notice the example of a centre risen in the Sicilian territory and exactly in the territory around Agrigento called Villaseta. In this quarter of ancient origin (XVII sec.) a new district was built at the threshold of 1966, the urban intervention promoted by the Ministry of Public Works, was entrusted to the Italian section of the International Solar Energy Society (ISES). The quarter was planned according to the rationalist parameters fashionable in that period . Today Villaseta is in a dilapitated, degrading and extremely indecorous state. A ghetto district where the state of desolation and abandonment is breathed in the air that surrounds it. Beyond every social and political considerations what we perceive is the failure of a certain architecture of the last century that having copied badly from more authoritative examples has produced a building of poor architectural and constructive value. In Villaseta the architecture of reinforced concrete describes in all forms/aspects its dangerous vulnerability. PROGRAM AND AIMS Reading parameters: -analysis of structure, materials and function; -preservation diagnostics according to materials state (creation of data base); -monitoring of planning and intervention costs; Final results: -innovative instrument for data analyses. -experimental analysis of structural reclaim and degradation prevention; -check on the validity of the new techniques on a sample building;