Adaptive reuse and conservation. An architectural proposal for Palazzo della Ragione

The thesis focuses on the combination of the perspective of adaptive reuse and the perspective of conservation for the reason that they are indispensable from each other when bringing a heritage building to a satisfying condition, which means, vitalizing them. The theme is to reuse heritage buildings on the premise of conservation. More essentially, the combination has to pass from theory to an applicable design method, since there is not so sufficient instruction of application when it comes to the subject of adaptive reuse and conservation. In order to achieve a convincing combination of the two perspectives, each of them is carefully investigated about their features and limitations. Then a strategy of functional alternation is generated from the theoretical basis. The strategy acts as the convergence between the theoretical combination and the final solution- “the skeleton”- which has been used for the project of Palazzo della Ragione. Palazzo della Ragione is an important heritage building among the panorama of Italian medieval architecture, not only because it is located in the very center of the city of Milan, but also because it represents the typology of “broletto”. It was built in the thirteenth century and originally served as a judicial seat as well as the intersection of commercial and political life. However, there is a huge confrontation between the outstanding value of the palazzo and the fact that nowadays it is suffering from an unacceptable alternation between underuse and occasionally non-use. The difficulty lies in the huge gap between the value that need to be conserved and the practical requirement of the contemporary use, which has raising standards. The requirements and regulation usually conflict with heritage buildings, both materially and non-materially. At the same time, how to arrange the function alternation and the gap time between the alternations without harming the values is the crucial question that has to be answered. Therefore the feasibility of the design method “skeleton” is the key point of our project both for the settlement of precarious problems of the palazzo, and because it is the concretization of the combination of adaptive reuse and conservation. Based as much as possible on a realistic premise, the functional alternation is accomplished inside the system of the skeleton. Through the proposal of Palazzo della Ragione, the method is verified from the theory to the strategy to the design. Also more importantly, the thesis can be used as well to a wider range of heritage buildings and enhance their value.