The 20th-Century Heritage and the collective housing buildings: the refurbishment of the Orphanage “Don Minozzi” in Antrodoco, L'Aquila

The case study presented regards an Orphanage built, within a specific social program, by the O.N.P.M.I. (National Opera for Southern Italy) for "the physical and moral assistance of war orphans" in the first half of the twentieth century. The building, designed by the architect Vittorio Paron, author of numerous other orphanages, was built between 1950 and 1957 and it presents a distribution and volumetric arrangement articulated, according to the functionalist approach. With a total area of 1860 sq.m., apportion over five levels, with services and classrooms on the first and second floors and dormitories to the last three, the building has load-resisting skeleton consisting of reinforced concrete frames and of collaborating curtain walls made of masonry stone or brick. The objective of this contribution is to report the results of the validation of an operative methodology elaborated in the complex of the research activity on the topics of refurbishment, in particular also of the specific typologies of the twentieth century Italian architecture, in particular those for collective housing. The methodology, by detailed phases of the building critical analysis, deals with the identification of what is defined as the "charter of values" and the related levels of transformability necessary for defining the objectives of “active conservation” and their operational translation. Specifically, in the case study, “active conservation” has translated into the restoring strategy of the original architectural and spatial features of the building, also in respect of the historical and symbolic value that the building has assumed in the local context, giving coherence to a prevailing conservation address for Italian modernism. At the same time, this approach involved in-depth analysis on the new use, both compatible with the layout and the organization of building spaces, and suitable to the resolution of some critical issues related to the surrounding territory. These aspects suggested the transformation into a tourist accommodation with specific services that are integrated with the local context.