Technological innovation and urban development: the new architectural envelopes of the urban industrial heritage

The identity of the contemporary city is nowadays not only based on its physical aspects and on its historical memory, but also on the complex and often contradictory system of relationships between its formal, social and constructive elements. Beside the established city centers there are still many places in a condition of abandonment and out of the main transformation urban processes, called industrial dross-capes, that constitute a very important resource for the city because they can be an innovative link between urban development strategies and technological innovation requirements. The need for experimenting new interpretative tools and new sustainable approaches to the intervention in the existing urban structure gives us the possibility to restore the dignity of these places transforming them into a contemporary layer co-habiting with new landscape, productive and residential layers so to activate new lifecycles saving at the same time the urban territory consumption. In this scenario, alongside all the possible disciplinary contributions, the technological design acquires a particular importance not only for the possible answers to the topic of co-habitation of tradition and innovation, but mostly for its contribution to the problem of the relationship between form and constructive/structural aspects, between esthetical renewal of the buildings and ethical shared values referred to sustainability of materials, techniques and processes. This is particularly evident at the scale of the architectural envelope that becomes the main strategic device used by the design practice to define innovative interpretation in regenerating existing buildings such as the abandoned industrial constructions. Therefore, the essay aims to analyze the relationship between the urban development of the industrial heritage and the technological innovation of the architectural envelope, by identifying the actual aesthetical and ethical strategies looking at the international context and focusing on the urban industrial heritage of the city of Bari as possible places of critical technological design experimentation.