Building on the Build. Unfinished Architecture and Confiscated Property as New Palinsesto for the Contemporary Architecture

The co - presence of multiple temporalities opens a narrative space that includes the biography of each object, the context of its reuse, the intentions of those who wanted it and its reception. The materiality of objects, with the traces they bear of their event s, welds these aspects together more and better than the eloquence of a text or the impact of a museum exhibition». Over time, the designer has taken on the role of 'defuser' of bad practices that have changed the appearance of places through dynamics that have escaped the a ction of even the most attentive scholars of social and urban practices. The need emerged to ask we how to change course with respect to the multitude of anonymous, abandoned and unfinished spaces precisely because of the intrinsic potential of what has emerged as a residue, but which contains within itself all the potential of the repertoire. As George Simmel wrote in his essay dedicated to Auguste Rodin when speaking of what appears unfinished, «If there were some truth in the theory according to which the user must repe at the creative process within himself, this could not happen more energetically than when the imagination of spectator must complet e what is unfinished, transferring into him the productive movement between the work as it appears and what should be its final effe ct». In fact, precisely in what is crystallized in time, the potential of the possible is present, the vision of a future that can co me true in the eyes of the beholder. Pre - existence presents itself as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein where «you can give shape to dark and amorphous substances, but you cannot give birth to the substance itself». This research aims to analyse the methods of good practices o f designing with pre - existence, useful tools for imagining a new and poetic way of "building on the built".