Costruire per il riuso. Pionerismi italiani per l'abitare provvisorio (1936-1945)

The interest in the reuse of construction systems and components has favored in recent decades a reconsideration from an environmental point of view of building industrialization, and of prefabricated systems in particular, for their ability to support the topics - typical of reuse - of containing the consumption of resources, preventing the formation of waste, and maintaining the qualities of the original component. While reuse was a frequent practice in traditional masonry construction, it experienced a significant arrest in the first half of the twentieth century, even if some typologies, such as that of temporary constructions, escaped this trend. In the Italian context, the phenomenon is associated with prefabricated constructions aimed at the emergency building sector and settlements in the territories of the Italian colonies in East Africa in the 1930s and to demountable housing for the post-war emergency. The cases presented in these notes concern buildings developed in Italy with wooden matrix structures and light curtain walls made with sandwich panels. These are buildings that no longer exist, or unrealized projects, which can only be investigated through archival documents. The construction histories of these examples reveal an ante litteram idea of buildings as resources intended for multiple uses. The values of these buildings and projects, developed between advanced expertise and building proto industrialization, are the refinement of design processes, the development of components for walls, floors and roofs that can be demounted and reused, and the improvement of the connections.