Seel in historic fabric: concealment vs hightilighting

The steel material has changed over time its role in the historic building, passing from the first one linked to the purely technical aspects of consolidation, to the second one, where it is considered a project item with specific intents in the design act. Certainly, these two roles are correlated to different way to use the steel, employed for metallic elements disguised by the existing material or, on the contrary, for components put in view. On the one hand, the rehabilitation project uses metal components for theirs high structural performances, placing them in an hidden position; on the other hand, the transformation project uses steel as a material capable of operating the renovation, finding in the Italian tradition an important technical and formal experimentation, which shows the ability to overlay to the historic layers the ones related to the contemporary culture. The binomial between concealment and exposure of the added elements is the investigation field of this research, which explores the delicate boundary between the visible and invisible sphere as a pretext to understand the dynamics of the Italian design for the built heritage, known for ranging from conservation to transformation: the duality between these two poles gives to different levels of evidence the task of defining the steel role.