Three Projects, Three Scales, One Vision: Regenerating Existing Architecture Through Green and Smart Technologies

By now it is clear that the future and beauty of contemporary city (in our case of study, usually european) is decided from the necessity to recompose and regenerate urban spaces and buildings which have now been dismissed and relegated: architectural projects in these places have to attempt to re-define open spatialities giving quality to the urban space.  This intervention illustrates various project experiences which were conducted inside a master degree thesis laboratories, an experimental workspace guided by our research group. It deals particularly with three interventions which are differing in context and scale, but whose trait d'union is the interdisciplinary design logic that shifts from a purely architectural standpoint to one which is more specialized, engineered, and capable of efficiently facing technological themes involved in the reanalysis of complex situations. The first project addresses the urban-territorial scale: It deals with a project of the requalification of Cabanyal, an ancient maritime neighborhood in Valencia. The heart of the project foresees the continuing of the Parco del Turia, which lies inside this neighborhood, introducing a new urban system capable of mending the construction fractures which have accumulated over time. The second moves to a level of more detail, concentrating its efforts on building scale: It is a project based on the regeneration of a social housing located on the outskirts of Ancona. This intervention is characterized by the technological elements used to minimize the ecological footprint of the structure, and more importantly the way in which these elements become the generating element of the formal aspects.Instead the third one reflects on the exception represented by the suburban centralities, real and actual satellites of the downtown city: in particular, it deals with the conversion of a dismissed brick furnace located in the countryside landscape of central Italy into a contemporary hub for culture and recreation.