Architecture and memory

Abstract

This paper investigates the links between architecture design and restoration, considering the blurry frontier that distinguishes this actions. The study holds in two contemporary architects performance: Lina Bo Bardi (1914-1992) and Aldo Rossi (1931-1997). The analyses of the concrete production, presented here by a work of each architecture – Sesc Pompeia and the Teatro Del Mondo – is based on the ability of reflection on the role of the memory in architecture: not only the memory in the buildings and urban fabrics materiality, but also the memory as an active instrument inside the mental processes adopted by the projects authors. Resorting to architects writings as well as authors who analyses this interventions, they seek to reconstitute the design development path, recognizing the strategy that reinterprets past experiences in order to overcome the traditional contraposition between “old” and “new”, tutorship and innovation.