Contamination

The word contamination, starting from its etymon, unfolds certain characters that weave a close interweaving with architecture. Beginning with the Latin derivation contaminatio -onis, the prefix con implies the act of contaminating, soiling, dishonouring an organism through union with another entity that alters its integrity to generate a new form without erasing the previous one. The root of tag (tangere) reinforces this aspect: contact requires the presence of two entities, heterogeneous to each other, whose relationship produces mixing and hybridisation, transforming their nature. The word makes it possible to address on several levels the factual contamination that manifests itself in the adaptive recovery by taking, for each aspect, an architectural duet between a work of the classical and one of the contemporary. The mixing of antinomies, between the sacred and the profane, marks the multiple stratification of the urban fabric; the contamination between different types of construction that sully the purity of unitary systems to reach an architectural hybridity; the attention of the contaminative gesture in mixing heterogeneities become three syntactic reading modes for an adaptive reuse.