Reuse of the Church of San Domenico: approach and adaptive strategies for the design of a new congress center

The contribution aims to show strategies and methods that represent the basis of a design experimentation aimed at the reuse of the Church of San Domenico, L'Aquila, in a conference hall. The ancient building, which has great potential in terms of attractiveness for the city thanks to the spiritual specificities that characterize the religious complex as a whole, is the subject of a proposal for functional redevelopment that must take place through reversible interventions, addressed to its conservation and enhancement. The need of defining new models of use for its spaces has involved the draft of several flexible design layouts, in order to adapt this architecture to several unpredictable future functions. Therefore, the criteria of adaptive reuse are particularly consistent with the suggested design experimentation in terms of spatial flexibility and low impact on this particular case study.