Unexpected outcrops of "heritage" in historical contexts. The house-shack of poet Valentino Zeichen in Rome

The paper focuses on the “house-shack” of Valentino Zeichen (1938-2016), a very famous poet of the roman and Italian cultural scene. Located in the very heart of Borghetto Flaminio, inside the “cultural” axis of Flaminia Street, the house-shack is a micro-place with a high poetic density deeply in contrast with its architectural and formal inconsistency. Assuming that any architectural artefact is a tangle of tangible and intangible values, Zeichen’s house-shack draws our attention on some fundamental questions: what shall we document and how? How can we assess its value from a historical and critical standpoint? What kind of conservation should be performed? How could we use such “informal monuments” as a drivers for urban regeneration? The research developed on this cultural “topos” (huge in terms of intangible value and irrelevant in terms of material consistency) pushes to the limit the disciplines connected with the Representation, History, Restoration and Design of Architecture. Standard methodologies are in fact inadequate in this case being mainly oriented to the investigation of tangible values of artefacts and not to their intangible components. This evidence has drawn us towards the reinterpretation of some consolidated paradigms: from the very fundamentals (concepts and methods) of architectural disciplines to the need of a sound multidisciplinary approach exceeding the limit of Architecture. Our experience has reinforced the idea of Representation, History and Restoration of Architecture being across-cutting tools for the elaboration of a critical assessment on artefacts as well as for the passing on to new generations of values that are fragile, vanishing and intangible like those expressed by the “House of the Poet”. This “extreme” research topic about knowledge, conservation and possibly management and fruition has led to original methodologies we consider innovative to improve the typical top-down approach used in urban regeneration interventions.