From the measure to the contemporary project of re-use. Palazzo Vernazza at Castrì di Lecce, a case-study

The aim of the study on the Palazzo Vernazza at Castrì is to propose and test a method for the project of regeneration, partial reconstruction, reuse of historical buildings and its appurtenances. The method should be applicable to the various scales and could start from the analysis of the primary compositional geometries, becoming memories of the contemporary project of re-use. From what remains, the survey and the analysis of ruined or abandoned historical buildings turn out to the starting point of a research on the “exact measure” upon which modulating contemporary interventions. Survey and design contribute to this study on the main compositional principles of the buildings, as well as to their graphic transcription as a product of the “rewriting” and decoding of the architectural conceptual and functional program, and of the related underlying rules, which become the result of a disciplinary synthesis. The comprehension of the original conceptual framework is therefore proposed as a key to understand the historical continuity no longer in terms of style or imitative approaches, or even in a pure restoration methodology, as the only solution to recover buildings and urban historical areas. The proposed method allows a contemporary approach to the project for which the assumption of the prime “tracés régulateurs”, no longer visible in figurative terms, is perceptible at an unconscious level as “correct” because it is based on a scientific-mathematical rule, as an inferred measure, and an unveiled geometry. The survey, the metric analysis and the projects here presented are the result of this experimental case study research that will take in the next year two additional case studies in the same geographic area.