The Urban restoration of the Rabato-Santa Croce district in Agrigento, Sicily: Conservation, resilience and architectural morphogenesis

The essay is a contribution to the theme of urban restoration, focused on the revitalization of the historic district “Rabato-Santa Croce” in Agrigento, partially destroyed by a landslide in 1966 and still rather uninhabited. The research reverses the terms of the problem as usually set and reflects on issues always different in relation to the complex critical-aesthetic implications and the changing conditions of conservation. After excluding a technocratic conception of the intervention, the methodological approach analyses “case by case” the elements of a fully historicized structure and defines a vision of the intervention that ranges from the most radical preservation of material consistency to the integration of modern materials and structures to the ancient buildings.