Catania: progetti minimi

Nowadays the aim of every restoration work seems the impartiality, not taking a critical stance toward the archaeological ruin, his proximity and his relationship with the town. In doing so, the archaeological dig becomes an unresolved matter, halfway between the desire of restoring it and the inability of making this desire come true. Thus, what they got are just urban voids unrelated to the urban space. The research group of architects which I belong to, is taking a different path. We are conducting a work about Catania starting from the idea that the best way to respect the ruins is taking a specific stance toward it. An undercurrent town lies under the level of the current one, the inhabitants use to call it “Catania vecchia”. It punctually emerges to the “upper town” by that urban voids we referred to before. The group has conducted a series of projects, called “progetti minimi”, consisting of cabinets on a city-wide scale in which the ruin is kept. The use of a noble material and the design of a definite geometry let the archaeologies appear as gems and not as a temporary object in the urban pattern. On the other hand, every project doesn’t go beyond the edge of the archaeological site: it doesn’t touch the ancient stones physically, it rather intends to underline the difference between the ancient and the current levels, to make emerge evocatively the distance between the two eras. The whole aim is designing spaces dominated by the evocative presence of the ruins.