Structures & Appearance: Engineering & Architecture for Heritage Conservation

The Summer School presents the opportunity to discover the design’s issues behind the historic built environment by investigating the relationship between restoration issues and those related to the structural aspects of pre-existence. The activities are calibrated to guide a critical reflection on contemporary operations in the field of restoration through discussion and dialogue among internationally renowned engineers, architects, experts and designers, in order to offer an educational experience in an extraordinary innovative and interdisciplinary key. Design practice in the field of heritage restoration and conservation requires articulated readings at different scales, with a horizontal view capable of governing, in the design process, the different specificities from the structural and architectural to those of the historic urban landscape, feeding the vertical sense of disciplinary insights. The complexity of cultural heritage therefore requires a development of the culture of engineering and architecture in a transversal sense as well, permeable to the contributions of other disciplines, seemingly distant, but also internal to heritage, according to an innovative approach of dialogue between STEM disciplines and the humanities. The Summer School Structure&Appearance 2024, reserved for 30 participants, is open to architects, engineers, as well as students, and CFP and CFU recognition is provided.  The contribution of the lectures, carried out by university professors and architects and designers, aims to update and provide participants with critical and operational tools on some of the main themes of intervention on the built heritage: the role and forms of knowledge, innovative techniques of structural intervention, the criteria of restoration’s culture, and the different guidelines on the subject, with a perspective sensitive to the relationship with technology, energy sustainability and the requirements of planned conservation to increase the quality of the project. In the designated location, Villa Favorita, confronting a monumental heritage of international relevance, activities will be carried out on an emblematic case, such as the Sacred Area of the archaeological site of Herculaneum, in order to structure theoretical-operational reflections and elaborate compatible design solutions. To publicise the value of the activities conducted, an exhibition open to the public will be held at the end of the initiative, and the work produced will flow into a scientific publication.