Aesthetics of ruins and ethics of architectural design: new interventions on archaeological heritage

This study aims to analyze the relationships between archaeological ruin and architectural design in their complex implications on contemporary landscape construction. Starting from the definition of “significance” and “value” for the vestiges, it investigates reasons, necessities and intervention criteria in archaeological sites, in relationship with the settlements’ entity and with the society and environment cultural factors. The text lays the foundations to overcome, epistemologically, the idea of design as “transformation”, recuperating a “gadamerian” interpretative approach and demonstrating how the aesthetic value of architecture is linked to its dialogic dimension, and how this, prior to configure as strategy of ethical legitimacy, is a condition that intrinsically and specifically qualifies the cultural landscape and, as such “archaeological”, is inherent the nature of the place.