Catania: Progetti minimi

Nowadays every restoration work seems headed by the impartiality toward the archaeological ruin and his relationship with the town. The archaeological dig becomes an unresolved matter, halfway between the desire of restoring and the inability of making this desire come true. What they got are isolated urban voids. The research group of architects, which I belong to, is taking a different path. We are conducting a work about Catania convinced that the way to respect the ruins is taking a stance. An undercurrent town, called “Catania vecchia”, lies under the current one. It punctually emerges to the “upper town” by the urban voids we referred to before. The group has conducted a series of “progetti minimi”, consisting of shrines on a citywide 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 stops “on the edge” of the archaeological site: it does not touch the ancient stones materially; it rather intends to underline the gap 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.