Cinquant’anni di Westbeth Artist Community. Riuso, patrimonio e vita partecipativa

The Westbeth Artist Community, the first meeting between architecture and loft living, fifty years after its ideation, continues to be an outstanding example rarely exceeded in terms of innovation and architectural research in the field of reuse of industrial heritage for residential purposes. The article, through the analysis of floor plans, photos and autor's graphic reworks, aims to investigate the ingenious strategy of inclusion of residential uses and working ones, the principles and the issues with which the architect, Richard Meier, had to figure out to define a new model of living together. Conclusions show that the interest of this project goes far beyond the economic sustainability. The values of the intervention can be found in the sense of proportion; in the knowledge of the Modern project cleansed of harmful extremes and reported on a careful plan of understanding and responsibility, in a pragmatic attitude to identify unconventional solution to the housing problem. What we need is not - or not only - to build more residences, but to try and figure out how to inhabit vacant spaces within the urban fabric and how to start from here a shared process of urban re-appropriation.