Ricerc@Sapienza

According to Herzog & de Meuron
approach, intervention on historic
fabric produces potentially a new
construction that draws energy from the
existing buildings, whose role proves to
be subordinated to the project issues and
requirements. Such an approach has been
referred, by the architects themselves, to an
interesting comparison to the Aikido martial
art strategy. The goal is not to attack but to
use the enemy’s energy to reach the own
aim. Conservation assumptions are actually
completely overturned as the aim is not
addressed to protect the existing building,
recognizing its own value, but rather
to exploit its features to enrich the new
construction. The creative process moves
from an attentive investigation of the
expressive qualities of the existing building
which is finalized to transfer them by a
symbiotic and not dialectic relationship.
Elements of the old buildings move to
the new one to strengthen its expressive
power. At the different architectural scales,
the project is based on the concept that
matter drawn away from its natural
context gains a new expressive force.
Although the architects intention is to draw
‘energy’ from the existing building to boost
up the new building, the method which
is carried on enhances an interesting
process, which triggers from an in deep
analysis phase and allows to ‘listen’ and
‘understand’ the exiting building secrets, so
that they can be told by the new creation.
The result is that when the historical
context is considered enough powerful
from the expressive point of view, Herzog
and De Meuron architecture proves to
follow a kind of codex suggested by the
context itself. Actually achieving a result,
which gets very close to conservation.