Ortigia: A code of professional practice for the conservation of the façade of ordinary buildings in the historical towns
The experience of Ortygia (Sergio Tinè)
Introduction
In the present lexicon of the Italian language for "code" is intended, generally, a harvest of laws that concerning with a particular sector or, also, a specific relative legislation to a determined branch of the law. According to such lexical interpretation the "codes of professional practice" can be considered to the same of antiseptic containers of norms, of ties, of prescriptions or as a whole of pre-parcelling models or of rigid standards (more suitable for the realization of new constructions).
In the today's professional practice, to the abundance of handbooks and manuals rich in predefined solutions or of rigid typologies of intervention, it corresponds progressive planning annihilation of numerous technicians that transform the former conservative intent, realizable exclusively through "culturally and critically technical aware actions", in a daily routine of uncritical transformations inevitably forgers and destructive.
To avoid these risks the professional updating should be effected with tools able to offer an wide "code of reading", not only on the values proper of the ordinary building and on the most correct formalities to realize the conservative intervention, but above all on what and how much the specificities are proper of every historical town, of every building compartment and of every single building; everything this always conscious that the act of the conservation is contemporarily historical-critical judgment and technical-scientific knowledge and that in it humanistic and diagnostic-operational circles are understood.
Interpreting the lexicon of the word "code" in the widest sense of a system of signs, conventional and symbolic, able to transmit an information, or of a whole of linguistic and stylistic elements that characterize the building system in examination, it can be reached to an harvest of deprived rules of legislative but rich value of different content resulting from the local customs and from the "done properly".
As in the case of the search on the façade of the ordinary historical buildings in Ortigia, needs to consider the pre-existences systematically studying them in their historical and technical values, paying the due attention to the structural typologies, to the constructive systems and to the nature of the materials, identifying most recurrent pathologies in relation to the particular environmental state and examining, finally, the complex aspect of the yard and the realization of the work. It's necessary, also, with the help of the most actual addresses of method, to analyse the possible technical solutions appraising the merits and their lacks, constantly comparing the traditional systems with the most actual techniques of intervention.
It's clear that such a study, although inspired to methodological addresses and to general criteria, could furnish exclusively only a limited number of valid suggestions within the geographical limits of the site in examination.