Ancient material and steel:project strategies on the content and the container of the museums of the Italian reconstruction

Development and industrial organization have generated a strong division of knowledge, turned to specialized aspects rather than the complex and the complexity of the problems. The design craft, which ensures the collective sharing of building, is replaced by the mass production that accentuates the gap between design and technology. Yet, the machine civilization has allowed the diffusion of materials, such as steel, with enviable technical performance, a fortiori if it’s used in the recovery of cultural heritage, for beeing easy to assemble in the constructive site and for the relation between lightness and structural strenght which ensures the possibility to work on the existing heritage without making substantial increases of loads on the fabric already built. The use of steel technology in the rehabilitation project had different outcomes over the time, reaching the first synthesis in the Italian experiments of the 50s and 60s: the design of the individual "pieces" of construction, then produced in factory, allows the architects to project the elements as unicuum. A design based on continuous cross-references between the "whole" and the "part", carefully controlled in terms of coherence and compatibility both internal and external, let to plan new architectures, employing strategies that range from the formal re-definition of existing volumes to the insertion of fragments as separate item, able to set a dialectical relationship between the old heritage and the new one. The present research wants to explore the first important moment for legitimize steel as a material able to transform the existing assets, giving to it a new identity, recognizable by the community as a product of his culture. The contribution presents an analysis of Italian projects in order to provide a tool for the validation of requalification processes for the cultural heritage.