THE SELECTIVE DEMOLITION: A “MINE” FOR THE SUSTAINABLE BUILDINGS REGENERATION

The poor state of preservation prevailing in the post-war Italian building heritage, with some issues mainly at the installations and at the non-structural elements, requires urgent interventions for buildings regeneration. The increasing demand of environmental sustainability aims to reduce the amount of waste from construction and demolition, encouraging recycling and recovery operations. The regeneration of existing buildings draws attention to the life-cycle of materials and to their residual performance. They presuppose the planning of the demolition steps with the purpose of obtaining homogeneous categories that simplify and enhance the reuse and/or the recycling. However, such attention cannot ignore the relationship with the territory, in order to trigger closed cycles of the material and to encourage the development of local sustainable supply chains also able of creating new economic models. The selective demolition is configured as a tool that requires, therefore, a programmatic approach starting from the territory to get to the building. The planning of the steps and methods of the demolition, the site organization, the storage and analysis of the end-life materials are prerequisites for a controlled regeneration, aimed not only to the improvement of building performance, but also to the needs of inhabitants in the lapse between demolition and reconstruction. We propose temporary housing units, quickly assembled and self-sufficient, providing a concrete answer to the problems of time management of the selective demolition in inhabited buildings. Notably, in the case study of L'Aquila, we also consider the provisional systems to secure existing buildings that can become a new source of 'materials' to reuse to build new housing units. The housing units could be used to improve the accretion of the built through controlled superfetations.