Progettare sul costruito: la strategia dell’Aikido di Herzog & de Meuron

According to Herzog & de Meuron approach, intervention on historic fabric produces potentially a new construction that draws energy from the existing buildings, whose role proves to be subordinated to the project issues and requirements. Such an approach has been referred, by the architects themselves, to an interesting comparison to the Aikido martial art strategy. The goal is not to attack but to use the enemy’s energy to reach the own aim. Conservation assumptions are actually completely overturned as the aim is not addressed to protect the existing building, recognizing its own value, but rather to exploit its features to enrich the new construction. The creative process moves from an attentive investigation of the expressive qualities of the existing building which is finalized to transfer them by a symbiotic and not dialectic relationship. Elements of the old buildings move to the new one to strengthen its expressive power. At the different architectural scales, the project is based on the concept that matter drawn away from its natural context gains a new expressive force. Although the architects intention is to draw ‘energy’ from the existing building to boost up the new building, the method which is carried on enhances an interesting process, which triggers from an in deep analysis phase and allows to ‘listen’ and ‘understand’ the exiting building secrets, so that they can be told by the new creation. The result is that when the historical context is considered enough powerful from the expressive point of view, Herzog and De Meuron architecture proves to follow a kind of codex suggested by the context itself. Actually achieving a result, which gets very close to conservation.