Conservation/Adaptation. Keeping alive the spirit of the place. Adaptive re-use of heritage with symbolic values

Adaptive reuse can be described as ‘the process of wholeheartedly altering a building by which the function is the most obvious change, but other alterations may be made to the building itself, such as the circulation route, the orientation, the relationship between spaces; additions may be built and other areas may be demolished. In context, besides retaining the material values of buildings or sites, an important aspect of reuse is the preservation of immaterial significance. This is particularly important in the case of symbolic buildings or sites where the spirit of the place is important, such as those with social, political, commemorative or religious meaning, or those with a negative or ‘infected’ history. The book addressed some difficult questions: how to combine the reanimation of such a building or site with the transmission of its material and immaterial values? What are the limits and opportunities in the adaptive reuse of this type of ‘sensitive’ heritage? How is the genius loci – the spirit of place – to be preserved? Is it the adaptive reuse the right way to answer to the need of conservation in architecture? The results of this research seem to demonstrate that the conservation approach is better satisfied with other types of intervention.