Adaptation Tales. The Permanent Condition of Disaster

Within a current worldwide framework of climate change and sociopolitical tensions, disasters are defining variable architectural responses that are progressively changing the architectural design parameters and standards. The intensification of anthropic and natural catastrophes, together with a gradual and unstoppable change (e.g., droughts or energy crises), have effects on the built environment and, in particular, on the Architectural Heritage. These effects are both immediate and indirect. The immediate consequences are measurable through damages and losses, while the indirect ones are the result of a layering process due to a slow adaptation “well understood by the anonymous builders” (Rudofsky, 1964: 9) that has brought historical buildings and fabrics to their actual shapes and peculiarities, with “architecture [that] confirms its essential role, time and time again” (Lucente, Trasi, 2019). The contribution observes how Architectural Heritage has changed over the centuries in response to slow or dramatic change. Looking at historical techniques and contemporary solutions, it emerges how the adaptation process that involves existing buildings is firstly a political question where “architecture […] involves both acceptance and change” (Unwin, 2009: 145). The possible interventions on a damaged (or even lost) building may deal with its constructive history in response to contextual and environmental circumstances that have changed and still change today. Considering the slow process that has built historical architecture, is it today possible to work on its adaptation to such a dramatic and fast change “in an abbreviated time” (Maki, 1964: 30)? Could the intervention on the historical heritage be aligned with a long and progressive history of change and adaptation?