Enhancing the identity of the historic built heritage, with the awareness of the need to transmit its beauty to future generations, forms the foundation of Open Project’s approach to restoration. Intervening on a historic asset is never a purely technical act, but a cultural one, involving responsibility, knowledge, and deep respect for the built fabric and for the history that has shaped it.
Restoration is understood as a practice of conserving the historical-material palimpsest, a tool for revealing its stratifications, interpreting its transformations, and consolidating its vulnerabilities, so that the work may be safeguarded, experienced, read, and understood in all its complexity. This process is based on a historical-critical approach, in which every contemporary intervention is required to acknowledge its own presence, consciously inserting itself into a chronological framework that helps define the identity of our built history.
At Open Project, restoration design arises from this awareness and develops through a method that prioritizes caution, rigor, and critical judgment. The objective is the search for a third way between an a priori, integralist, and intransigent conservation approach and the reproposition of a “lost beauty” from an unrepeatable past, avoiding both mummification and mimetic reconstruction. Beauty, in this perspective, is not an instinctive fact, but the result of a cultural and cognitive process.
From a methodological standpoint, the theoretical principles of restoration remain shared; what changes between interventions on ancient buildings and those on modern ones is the understanding of the materials introduced in the early decades of the twentieth century, often conceived under the illusion of being eternal. Awareness of their vulnerability has guided Open Project in the restoration of works by Attilio Muggia (former Banco di Napoli in Bologna), Ildebrando Tabarroni (La Bolognese Colonies in Rimini), and, more recently, Pier Luigi Nervi (the “Ballette” of the former Manifattura Tabacchi in Bologna).
Among the most significant experiences are the restoration of the Civic Art Gallery of Guercino in Cento, the Monastery of the Visitation in Bologna—future headquarters of the Sant’Orsola Foundation—and the new entrance of the Teatro Comunale on Via del Guasto in Bologna. Particularly noteworthy is the intervention on the former Banco di Napoli, now the Bologna offices of PwC, in which Attilio Muggia’s eclecticism and the pioneering use of reinforced concrete were enhanced through the reinterpretation of original elements, brought into dialogue with contemporary needs. This process, based on the study of archival sources, was aimed on the one hand at safeguarding the past and on the other at opening toward the future and the principles of sustainability. The ground-floor courtyard, the ultimate symbol of the building’s Genius Loci, acquires a new contemporary semantic value while fully preserving its identity, returning to its role as a place of connection and sharing with the city—a true urban living room. The collaboration with artist Jacopo Ceccarelli ultimately added a new layer to the palimpsest of the building, expanding its meaning and beauty over time.
Curated by Professor Aldo Norsa