What is the “Training Course in Italy for Foreign Operators sponsored by ICE_Assorestauro” ?
The training course in Italy, promoted by ICE, offers to foreign delegates an insight into the restoration works carried out on important monuments in Italy, to help them understand how restoration is conceived and put into practice through the presentation of practical examples. The individual case studies clearly indicate that the current approach to restoration is increasingly based on a thorough knowledge and understanding of the monument and oriented to adopt a notion of conservation whereby the monument is considered as the result of its historic evolution, i.e. as the sum of the subsequent events that define its historic quality. The notion whereby restoring means recovering the “original” model is therefore getting increasingly overcome by the awareness that the process of analytical, historic and methodological learning of a monument must investigate the history of its construction, maintenance and degradation, with a view to planning restoration first (but only if strictly required) and then maintenance, so as to ensure that the character of the monument as time has handed it down to us will be preserved. Learning means understanding and understanding means restoring properly, respectfully, free from any ideological or speculative purposes. Learning means planning the future maintenance life of a monument, so as to prevent the need for new important restorations and the risk of seeing the monument turned into a stereotyped representation (a model of style) or into “something different” on speculative grounds.
Learning, surveying and understanding the construction methods means restoring punctually (some would call it shy restoration), by making the most of what the building itself and its structures can offer, by limiting the number of additions and, if any, making them visible as new layers. While some installations, structures and functions may enjoy derogations permitted by the law in case of old facilities, they are still often injuriously dismissed or replaced because of haste or misknowledge, and are even deprived of the honour of appearing in structural surveys, if only for the sake of records. Therefore, in addition to the high skills of the Italian restorers, and of the companies and manufacturers who support them, this approach takes as its main reference the development of an accurate plan to learn the monument with the help of different methods, which are from time to time conceived and applied to the individual case study. While these methods make precious tools, they risk to be reduced to a formal apparatus if they are used without the expertise of “specialized professionals”, only to justify the choices of design and not as the necessary reference to make such choices.
Architectural Restoration: a Methodological Comparison
Workshop 2016_ from April 3rd to 10th
Invited Countries: for East Europe_ Armenia, Iran, Lebanon, Russia, Turkey; for North America_Canada and USA; for South America_Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Argentina, Peru.
Specialist Restoration Works
Workshop 2015_from May 3rd to 9th
Invited Countries: Turkey, Egypt, Cuba, Iran, Armenia, Kosovo, Russia, Bulgaria, Lebanon, Argentina, Peru.