"Heritage as architecture: Methods and practices in Europe today" Symposium

Heritage as architecture: Methods and practices in Europe today
Symposium
Curated by Franz Graf e Giulia Marino

Campus Mendrisio
21–22 May 2025

At a time when the ecological transition requires us to reinvent a more responsible and conservative approach to architectural design, when energy efficiency paradoxically demands increasingly invasive interventions in existing buildings, and when demolition and reconstruction are still the dominant practices, designing within the existing built environment is emerging as a new paradigm. Although now imperative, it has been explored and tested for some twenty years in the challenging conservation of twentieth-century architecture, going beyond the consensual ‘reuse’ that has become trivial.
The analysis of a series of approaches to conservation, preservation and restoration, in terms of the project approach and its theoretical issues, as well as the most pragmatic construction requirements, will shed light on these new contemporary practices in 2025 at the European level. It will also open up a discussion, beyond all certainties, on virtuous strategies for intervening in existing buildings and benevolent practices, with a necessarily limited choice of options, but in a heritage with a strong qualitative identity, whether recognised or not.
A number of questions arise. What similarities and differences can be observed in monumental heritage restoration campaigns in different European countries and in relation to a more widespread heritage? What methods are being tested in a process that we consider to be exemplary? How effective are the tools - digital or other - used in the restoration project, from diagnosis to construction? How can project strategies in architecture of established quality inform processes where it is systematically sacrificed to energy and/or economic requirements?

Scientific committee                

• Eugen Brühwiler (EPFL Honorary Professor)
• Bénédicte Gandini (Fondation Le Corbusier)
• Franz Graf (USI-ARC Professor, Docomomo Switzerland)
• Richard Klein (ENSAPL Professor, Docomomo France)
• Giulia Marino (UCLouvain Professor, Docomomo Switzerland)
• Martina Voser (ETHZ Professor)

Organising Committee             

• USI-ARC Franz Graf and Carlo Nozza
• UCLouvain-LAB Giulia Marino and Emma Simonin
• Docomomo Switzerland