瓦伦蒂诺的小天使 —— 意大利修复设计方法及中国视角 The Valentino's Cherub: The Italian Way to Restoration Design and a Chinese Perspective

The aim of the paper is describing one of the Italian approaches to cultural heritage in architecture and urbanism, as it was explained by Paolo Marconi in his book Restoration and the Architect: Theory and Practice of Two Centuries’ Debate. Written in 1993 against the idea of “Pure conservation” and to promote the idea of “De-sign” in approaching the architectural heritage, that book is a theory of architectural design applied to the existing buildings according to the Italian tradition of re-use since the Renaissance’s time and thought. After 25 years, the idea of “designing solutions” inside the history of artefacts is for an architect something more meaningful than the nowadays fashionable (and functionalist) idea of “adaptive re-use”, born in younger cultures like the American and the Australian one. In the Chinese perspective, with a different idea of memory, authenticity and historical heritage in comparison with Europe, the Italian way could fi nd (and it is already fi nding) a new fi eld of experi-mentation and improvement, either at the scale of buildings or at the scale of land or at the scale of the city. The paper outlines a possible research project between China and Italy to pursue in the next decade.