Editorial to the special issue: documentation, restoration and reuse of heritage

Knowing, Valuing and Inhabiting are three words representing a future interpretation of a common material dealing with space and forms, by which a real experience with building practice and heritage inheritance knowledge is established, a heritage built over the millennia as a transformation of nature.

These three words are the central issue of the ‘cultural resource’, that must be capable of answering future demands regarding the protection and consolidation, growth and development of cities and territories by properly using lands and materials of an architecture stratified over millennia.

Corrige: Cultural Heritage is a resource involving themes, strictly linked among them, of knowledge, reading, interpretation, intervention, and recovery.

Aligned with the previous premises, the VII International Conference of ReUSO 2019 (documentation, restoration and reuse of heritage) organized on 23–26 October 2019 in Matera, Italy, the city awarded the European Capital of Culture 2019, promoted a multidisciplinary approach focused on cultural heritage issues, such as architectural surveys, traditional and innovative methods for preservation, construction techniques and materials, approaches and methods of diagnosis and monitoring, maintenance and durability of interventions, and numerical investigations.

Among the proceedings presented during this Conference, some works were selected to be re-submitted in an extended version and collected in this Special Issue. This collection consists of selected research, illustrations and projects, coherent with the Conference topics, in order to provide several examples of how it is possible to observe the architecture world and to preserve it in the future with a rational approach.

In ‘Modernity and tradition in the Sassi of Matera (Italy). Smart Community and underground (hypogeum) city’ (by V. Porcari and A. Guida), the impact of modernity with a delicate ecosystem such as the ‘Sassi of Matera’ is discussed. The authors highlight the importance of addressing recovery, re-functionalization and infrastructural integration, through the understanding of the urban environment and the opportunity to define a cultural orientation, which should be a sort of conduct code allowing us to re-inhabit this architectural heritage.

The paper ‘The sustainability of raw earth: an ancient technology to be rediscovered’ (by G. Bernardo, A. Guida and G. Pacente) focuses on earthen constructions. In this work two case studies are compared: an Italian case, located in the Lucania area, and a Chinese case, belonging to the Fujian region area. The authors illustrate the preliminary results of a multidisciplinary research activity focused on the recovery and enhancement of the landscape characterized by earthen constructions.

Recovery of industrial heritage is discussed in the paper ‘The industrial heritage as text and pretext for contemporary architecture’ (L. Palmero and G. Bernardo), where a case study is considered, the old Mediodía power plant of Madrid, in the so-called golden triangle of art formed by the Prado Museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and the national museum Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. The work presented pays attention to the recovery and transformation in Caixa Forum Madrid made by the Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, recognizing that this intervention represented a milestone in modern architecture in the city. By employing contemporary construction technologies and materials, the interventions preserved the original beauty of the heavy solid brick facades, allowing the structure to appear as if suspended from the ground floor.

In ‘The historical telegraphic towers from Madrid to Valencia: from knowledge to preservation and enhancement’ (by A. Martino et al.), first, a historical and morphological evolution of telegraphic towers is described. Then, a methodology is reported for qualification of the architectural, material, constructive and functional characteristics of the towers, by referring to the case study of the telegraphic paths between Madrid and Valencia. The authors conclude by proposing restoration of the towers, including their integration in a cycling and pedestrian naturalistic pathway.

A discussion of a disappeared twentieth-century architecture is presented in the paper ‘Tirana National Theatre: chronicle of an announced demolition’ (F. Pompejano and E. Macchioni). The work is focused on the Tirana National Theatre demolished in 2020, a construction having Italian connotations, since it was realized with a prefabricated system developed under the Fascist autarchy restrictions. The authors highlight how a deep protection culture is widespread today in the civil society and conservation community.

In the paper ‘The restoration of the concrete architecture of the 20th century. The Torre delle Nazioni of the Mostra d’Oltremare in Naples’ (by A. Catalano), a reinforced concrete case study is considered, paying attention to the difficulties of intervening with a material requiring a careful evaluation to determine the residual strength as a function of its useful life. The paper deals with the Tower of Nations, one of the most important buildings of the Mostra d’Oltremare, representing a valuable example of the architecture in Naples during the Fascist period.