Reconstruction, Addition, Grafting, Overlapping and Subtraction. Five Approaches to Intervention in Historic Contexts
The theme of designing in historic contexts is as old as the history of human construction. It could be said that every construction is a redesign of something pre-existing, whether artificial or natural. Since antiquity, the act of rewriting atop an existing building is determined, beyond merely functional aspects, by the desire to mark a gap, an interruption in a pre-existing condition. This occurs through the strong, and in some cases even violent, introduction of something new; an act that also comports a re-semantization of the building to be modified.