Autenticità e progetto: una chimera o un fondamento del restauro architettonico?

There is no doubt that in recent years, the term ‘authenticity’ has become widespread in some areas of contemporary architectural culture. Beginning with David Chipperfield’s reference to the Venice Charter as a guideline in the design choices for the well-known Neues Museum in Berlin, this mentioned manifestation of interest of the part of current design practice in the authenticity of the material underlines the attention paid to the material datum as a historical document to be preserved or as, even more, a founding element of the project. In fact, we have recently witnessed an expansion of interventions based on the predilection for the ‘unfinished’, the worn surface, in the manner of a new aesthetic code that seems to have substituted a letter for the Vitruvian venustas, making it mutate into the term vetustas as, precisely, the founding value of the beauty of architecture. Tadao Ando’s intervention at the Venetian Dogana, Jean Nouvel’s intervention at the Fendi Rhinoceros Foundation in Rome or, again, at the Madrid-based Escuelas Pías Cultural Centre in Lavapiés by Linazasoro, reveal, albeit with the necessary interpretations, an almost celebration of that hic et nunc whose preservation has been seen as a well-known and debated condicio sine qua non of authenticity. Authenticity, together with other criteria, such as reversibility, compatibility and minimum intervention, considered as suitable for a conscious restoration project, has a special significance today: its involvement marks not only the destiny of the pre-existence, that which is not protected by a normative control of protection and therefore more subject to falsification, but the very question of authenticity also affects the nature and quality of the project.