Architectural forms on archaeological ruins: a tectonic approach

The tectonic dimension of architecture, with its ethical approach to the urban transformations, as prefigured by many studies and authors like, between others, Kenneth Frampton, Hans Kollhoff, Gevork Hartoonian, etc., as well as demonstrated by reasonable design experiences during the last decades, constitutes nowadays the only choice to avoid, in the architectural discipline, on one hand the effacement of history and on the other hand the tendency toward the ephemeral and sometimes rhetoric scenographic representations: a reaction to some contemporary trends in architecture which distort the natural and traditional urban and landscape form concept of sustainability, to which the tectonic approach opposes an architectural design experience deeply rooted in space and time (Paris, 2016). But what happens when the project is required to establish a direct relationship with an existing structure such as a ruin, an historical trace or an ancient wall? In which way the design process starts to be influenced by the presence of the archaeological ruins and what kind of tectonic relationship could be constructed between new architecture and old constructions? The addition of a new building in an archaeological settlement poses a problem in terms of architectural and constructive solutions and the role of tectonics, in its semiotic and epistemological dimension, becomes fundamental in order to recover an ethical approach for the architectural design able to change the current interpretation of the Vitruvian triad in which utilitas (conditioned by economic rules) totally outweighs firmitas (ensured by technical customaries) and venustas (distorted by wrong cultural references), bringing it closer to a new poetic quality for the project. In this mark, this essay tries to outline an analysis methodology for the architectural forms in ancient context that, starting (in the paragraph called ‘Methodology’) from the recovery of the above mentioned Vitruvian triad in a contemporary vision and passing through the ‘montage’ as a way to reach a new idea of ‘unity’, arrives to the tectonic approach as a way to ethically control the new interventions criteria in the archaeological contexts, in which the new building becomes a ‘fragment’ of a larger cultural context. Then, in the following paragraph (‘Forming process’), the essay briefly reconstructs the cultural path of the architectural approach in the ancient urban context from the Fifties until today, showing as study cases three important recent experiences through which emerges a thesis that demonstrates how the issue of the relationship old/new is strictly related to the instances of tectonics.