Re-incorporar a casa. Regeneração tipológica do Terzo Palazzo em San Donato Milanese

Abstract

The dissertation is part of the UAH! Unconventional and Affordable Housing research program, whose ambition is to rethink contemporary housing beyond normative models, seeking critical, experimental, and accessible design approaches. In this context, the study develops from the notion of 're-incorporation' as a method of intervention in the built environment, understood as the possibility of regenerating dwelling starting from the needs of the body and its most basic daily activities, such as relating, eating, breathing, and sleeping. More than being tied to formal or functional solutions, the investigation proposes an approach that operates through networks of actions interlinking body, object, and environment, in order to promote silent mutations in reality and in ways of living. The proposed intervention in the Terzo Palazzo is conceived as an essay of such mutation, that is a subtle transformation that acts upon modes of inhabiting without imposing ruptures on the built landscape, but rather by working through the alteration of the existing. Configured as a non-authoritarian design attitude, guided by light and reversible options and by the discreet importance of infrastructures, re-incorporation is not a model imposed on the building, but a way of rethinking habits through space. By understanding plasticity as a fundamental characteristic of a space permanently exposed to the passage of time, this design stance demonstrates itself as contrary to the idea of a definitive solution, acknowledging complexity as an inherent and constitutive part of the reality it seeks to intervene in. Structurally, the document seeks to communicate this plurality through two volumes: the first gathers the main body of the investigation, where the theoretical framework and its practical outcomes are developed; the second is presented as an appendix to the dissertation, consisting of graphic and schematic material from the working process, simultaneously serving as an archive and as a visual essay. This division allows for the distinction between a primary discursive path and an expanded set of representations that support and multiply the reading of the themes addressed in the dissertation. In sum, the proposal of 're-incorporation' as a conceptual and operative method configures the investigation as an intrinsically theoretical-practical approach. Its exploration seeks to test the capacity and possibility of repositioning the body at the center of contemporary design, as a means of questioning current forms of life.