Ri-abitare le chiese

The research focuses on the theme of the reuse of “closed” churches paying attention both to the physical condition of the spaces and to their being places of the assembly, to their capacity to welcome, to new traces and new narratives. The text is structured into two parts: the first shows some synthetic results of a research dedicated to the churches of Venice, the second part is dedicated to the comparison between three projects of reuse of churches in Italy. In both chapters the problem of the reuse of ecclesiastical artefacts is faced on one hand by highlighting the concrete repercussions on architecture, and on the other hand, by highlighting possible and necessary revisions of the vocabulary, the tools and the idea of ​​the project. The adjective “closed” is used to assimilate artefacts not common from the plant, the history, the property and the condition point of view, which are no longer used for worship and whose door is mostly closed. In the first part the archipelago, made up of thirty churches uniformly distributed in the Venetian sestrieri, was read in a research path focused on Venice, on its forms of transformation and design based on three key words: “inheritance”, “use”, “tale”. The meaning “archipelago” also wants to underline a project intention. The number of artefacts involved in this survey on the use, on their location in the urban fabric, on their architectural nature are conditions that allow us to hypothesise a re-foundation of the city starting again from these elements. The second part analyses three cases of reuse and the establishment of a new activity inside three Italian closed churches: the Church of San Paolo Converso in Milan, converted today into an architectural office, the Church of San Pellegrino in Lucca, plaster deposit of the Polo Museale Toscano and the Church of Santi Cosma e Damiano in Venice, former business incubator. The three ecclesiastical buildings are based in complex urban realities and the interventions have been chosen for the different methodologies used in the architectural approach. All these inaccessible places await architectural answers, where the project of architecture guides all the other consequent actions, from those that lead to a conservative restoration of the artefact, to those that define new uses. The closed churches, that characterize every historical centre of Italy, are opportunities to rethink the idea of ​​monument, that of the assembly and of the city, they are inner but also “islands” with which to build a new archipelago capable of combining history and contemporaneity.