riUSO

Abstract

The experience of architecture of the past is a complex phenomenon, in which not only the perceptive potential of the user concurs, but also his ability to read and understand the signs stratified on the material. According to the definition of Charles Morris, processes in which something functions as a sign are called “semiosis”. One element we assume as a substitute for the meaning of something else is a “sign”. In this 'substitutive' function, the sign is considered under the two following profiles: as an element of the communication process and as an element of the relationship of signification.

In this part of the work, this assumption is used to understand the complex relationship between user, architecture and author of a restoration intervention.

In particular, the author initially refers to the theories of the "aesthetics of reception" developed by Alois Riegl at the beginning of the 20th through the so-called "interpretative cooperation": if we distinguish a text as an aspect of the work given to us by the author and its realization, made by the productive activity of the receiver, we reach the definition that the work of art is placed between one and the other, and more exactly at the point of convergence between text and receiver. Obviously, this point cannot be precisely and universally defined and so the work of art is characterized by its virtual nature.

At the same time, buildings of the past, being a palimpsest of ‘signs’ accumulated over time, represent a virtual connection to a cultural context which is now absent and through which the complex dialectic between past and present originates. The question of the ‘sign’ becomes a starting point to verify the possibility of using semiotic analysis as a cognitive-interpretative model, in which the architecture of the past is organized as a text, a story read from the point of view of the present.

As part of reuse, this ‘metanarrative’ of architecture is not, however, configured only as a project tool. In its various levels of analysis, it becomes an ‘investigative’ tool, a means of questioning itself on the reading itself, on its boundaries, but also on the way to orient the conservative intervention.