Lunch Lecture Series Part I: Gabriella Cianciolo
SYNTHETIC MODERN
Seed Funding Research
Disasters and Disjunctions: Lessons from Belice
When in 1968 the Belice Valley in Sicily was destroyed by an earthquake, architectural responses varied widely. Some towns were relocated, some reconstructed, some left in a state of ruin. Even though the city of Gibellina Nuova was a pioneering experiment in creating an open-air museum designed by renowned architects, artists, and urban planners, in the end the operation was a failure: what we see today are new ghost towns with unfinished buildings, oversized infrastructure, and empty spaces.
The case of Belice may stand as a warning for dramatic disjunctions in post-catastrophic recovery – between the visionary plans and what was actually accomplished, the remains of the past and the architectural enterprises of modernity, top-down and bottom-up initiatives. But it is also an example of the ways in which research strategies and new digital processes may be used to avoid comparable disjunctions in other cases of reconstruction of architectural heritages.
Professorship of Recent Building Heritage Conservation
Architekturmuseum der TUM
location | room 0340, main building, TUM