La solitudine delle architetture dismesse. Proiezioni immaginative per il patrimonio carcerario storico in Sardegna

The National ‘Extraordinary Plan for Penitentiary Architecture’, also called ‘Prisons Plan’, in 2010 emended by the Government to solve issues of overcrowding structures, has caused the decommissioning of several national historic monumental buildings, now able to offer new uses. Mainly correspondents to impressive structures, due to their form and dimension, once isolated from the city, these architectures have occupied a significant role in the urban fabric where they were built, offering important potentialities in terms of reuse within the contemporary city. In this context, the Sardinian historical penitentiary system is particularly rich and complex, as well as interesting both from the architectural and typological points of view. This finds reason in the national politics that, since the Ninetieth century, choose the island for its geographic location as preferential territory to build jails. This system consists of six ‘urban fabrics’, constructed starting from the thirties of the Nineteenth century and sited in Tempio Pausania, Cagliari, Sassari, Alghero, Lanusei and Oristano. Nowadays disused, these architectures can offer significant answers in the processes of ‘re-signification’ of urban historic areas, if we consider their position and their formal and typological characteristics (pseudo-panopticon, stellar and with courtyard). The present research, starting from the assessment of values of each fabric - urban, architectural-typological, technical-constructive - is focused on the definition of different solutions aimed at their conservation and reuse, following an interdisciplinary approach. This method, reached from a dialectic debate between Restoration and Architectural and urban design, proposes imaginative views able to re-think these architectures in new poetic human ways of living. Furthermore, the project involves other academic disciplines such as survey, technologies, economic geography and sociology, with in depth studies on the material, structural, energetic and viability aspects. More recent developments have also generated an active collaboration with the Department of Economic and Environmental Sciences of the University of Cagliari for the definition of feasibility studies, with the intent to define possible uses, activators of regeneration processes also to the wider scale.