Methods for operating on historic city centres. Reflections about Gianfranco Caniggia’s writings

This work examines the method for operating on historic city centres by means the analysis of the project about the “Rome’s voids” and the reections about Gianfranco Caniggia’s writings. With the Project of 1981-1986 about the historic centre of Rome, the Committee for Works in the Historic Centre recommends different initiatives to “transforme the notable delay of Rome’s adaptation to becoming the capital of Italy, into the potentiality of be- coming a different capital, a truly contemporary one”(Aymonino 1990). This was the case of the call made by the Committee along with Cooperativa Architettura Arte Moderna, inviting a lot of Italian architects to present ideas, proposals and projects (Aymonino 1990), setting up several design. Workshop n.5 (which focuses on the “Voids”of the historic centre) hosted, among others, Gianfranco Caniggia. In its Introduction, the participating architects were instructed to tackle “a number of irregular spaces, which have been cut out from the dense tissue of the renaissance-baroque city, to intervene – or not – with to “bring forward the possibility of reconstructing the continuous city, patching its lacerated parts with a tissue (...) derived from and redesigned on the basis of the reenactment of the genesis-modication of the conguration of its built spaces” (Caniggia 1997).