BOOKS BY MARIA ANTONIETTA CRIPPA

The paper gives a very brief outline of the issues and problems of the psychiatric hospitals examined in the historical study conducted by the Milan research unit of the Prin on ‘Mental hospitals in Italy in the nineteenth and twentieth century. A map of the architectural heritage to acquire knowledge and to make use of them’. It contains considerations on the ‘construction of the history’, identifying, amongst other things, the necessary distinctions between legitimate denial of the structures as psychiatric institutions and the features of the architecture and landscapes and the spatial practices of collective life, in terms of its physical components and the dimensions of representation and imagination, to be recovered from confused damnatio memoriae procedures, which caused serious harm to national culture.

Since the end of the 1970s when Law n. 180 decreed the closure of mental hospitals, the architectural and community characteristics of former Italian psychiatric hospitals has so far remained unexplored. The 2008 Prin research on this question, which was also to result in a geographical computer database connected with the National Archive System, laid the foundations for putting concrete processes in motion to safeguard this huge tangible and intangible heritage in which the traces of a ‘care system’ are inscribed, which reflects the features of Italian society since the first years of the young unified state. Although of value from many viewpoints, former public sector psychiatric hospitals in underused and run down areas can in fact become a concrete opportunity for integrated conservation action and urban recovery to make use of them for social utility purposes on a different scale.

This paper critically explores the relationship between the history of modern architecture and restoration of the modern, identifying connections and discrepancies between the contexts of the two disciplines. It finds the cause of the latter in the unstable structure of the history of modern architecture, which is changing rapidly from many points of view. It highlights how this situation can easily lead to problems and controversy over the restoration of the modern and especially over the specific conservation techniques designed to maintain its authenticity. Two famous images of Walter Benjamin are used to quickly underline the contradictions in which restoration may fall, those of the angel of history and of the pearl diver, taking them as a historical paradox. The purpose is also to underline the questions which accumulate around the history of the tradition of the modern.

The international framework highlights the complexity of the issues which modern restoration raises over the varied quality production of the 20th century, underlining its specificities, the variety and the vastness of its sources and the design and technological implications posed by continued use. The papers which follow lie on the borderline of the dialogue between designers and restorers, reflecting on the history of the modern, on the relationship between the ‘critical continuity’ of the modern and its internal organisation and on co-operation between architectural conservation and the transformation of contemporary contexts, within the issues of memory and identity which architecture involves, even in restoration projects which do not exclude modifications. The different orientations highlight the increased attention paid to a past that is still present as a physical fact and in everyday use.