Thesis title: Architetture Dissidenti. Interpretazione e strumenti per il riuso degli spazi eterotopici nella città consolidata
The doctoral research, entitled Dissident Architectures. Interpretation and tools for the reuse of heterotopic spaces in the consolidated city, is situated within the field of Architectural Restoration and addresses the issue of reusing large disused urban complexes - colleges, convents, prisons, hospitals, asylums, barracks - understood as heterotopias: “other” spaces capable of reflecting and subverting the order of the city. Its main goal is to construct a methodological and operational model for their reinterpretation and adaptive reuse, grounded in the principles of compatibility, reversibility, distinguishability, and minimal intervention, in line with current European approaches to heritage protection and regeneration.
The thesis proposes a multidisciplinary and trans-scalar reading that integrates restoration, architectural composition, urban history, sociology, philosophy, and neuroscience. The abductive approach allows the passage from empirical data to interpretive hypotheses, making the design process itself a tool of critical knowledge. These large urban architectures are examined as dispositifs (Foucault, Agamben) where rules, functions, and collective memories intersect. Starting from a taxonomy of spatial invariants - wall, courtyard, corridor, cell, threshold - the research reconstructs their genealogies, tangible and intangible values, and processes of transformation, establishing the basis for reuse strategies attentive both to the material heritage and to the experiential and social dimensions.
The research is structured in five parts:
1. Research, defining the disciplinary framework, objectives, and methodological tools;
2. Explorations, reconstructing the history, processes of disuse, and theoretical foundations of heterotopia;
3. Comparisons, analyzing heterotopic systems in Italy and France, with a focus on Toulouse and Cagliari;
4. Experimentations, dedicated to the case study of the Collegio di Santa Croce in Cagliari, a sixteenth-century Jesuit complex, through which the method’s transferability is tested;
5. Perspectives, which synthesizes the outcomes into design guidelines and an open-source digital atlas for data sharing and collaborative practices.
The comparison with France - especially with Toulouse - highlights how different models of governance, centralized and programmatic in France versus fragmented and episodic in Italy, affect the quality and sustainability of adaptive reuse processes. The study thus calls for an integrated governance model and for design practices capable of merging knowledge, conservation, and social innovation, overcoming the dichotomy between preservation and transformation.
The Santa Croce case exemplifies the method through the definition of criteria, thresholds, and typological matrices that calibrate the intensity of interventions and guide both temporary and permanent actions. Architectural invariants - courtyard, distributive spine, thresholds, and hypogea - become design instruments to restore porosity, continuity, and public value to a complex emblematic of the relationship between memory and use.
The research outcomes translate into operational guidelines for the restoration and enhancement of historical complexes, grounded in a vision of heritage as a living and shared resource. The thesis thus advances the notion of generative conservation: a practice of slow, reversible, and participatory reuse capable of producing new meanings and uses without erasing historical stratifications. Large urban factories - once marginal or stigmatized - are reinterpreted as civic and cultural infrastructures for the contemporary city, places of active memory and renewed citizenship.