The thread of preserving memory in the projects of Andrea Bruno

This research has been born out of a desire to provide an expanded critical interpretation of the restoration projects of Andrea Bruno, one that pertains to the more abstract problems inherent in the discipline and tries to understand architecture more generally as a concrete phenomenon. Considering Bruno’s place in the discipline, it has been acknowledged that his manifold interventions have in many ways embodied important contemporary methodological aspects of restoration, as his treatment of monuments and desire to preserve their memory can be seen as a significant episode that contributes to the academic and professional discussions in the field. At the same time, his presence in such discussions seems not to be as ubiquitous as one might assume, which is another reason for this research’s focus on his extensive body of work. With this in mind, this study argues that there is a “red thread” running through and uniting the architect’s projects, this being the thread of memory preservation, which is the other main reason to have Bruno as the research’s protagonist. His inherently intellectual approach to discussing the aspects of restoration has sparked a desire to take the essence of his publications and expand it through the lens of what seems to be the implicitly recognizable phenomenological tendency of his theory. This indicates that the lived experience of man becomes central to understanding the meaning of the architectural object, which is a theory that also applies to the valorization of the restoration intervention in the contemporary context, since its projects become ever more complex, technical, and innovative, for what concerns their positive execution and evaluation. The first-person point of view in this phenomenological reading, or rather proceeding, is aimed at the understanding and interpretation of an object by virtue of its meaning and contents, even though it will be later seen that this research accepts architecture as a non-representational form of art. This is another significant thread accompanying the overview of Bruno’s projects, one that can be attributed to the theorists of critical restoration from the middle of the 20th century - the emphasis and recognition of the work of architecture as a work of art, a notion through which the restoration project gains its critical-creative inclinations. The experience of or about something becomes the underlying theme of this research then, which indicates the important relationships accompanying the successful restoration project, that of the architect with the past and the present in his search for renewed authenticities and that of man in his inhabitation of a particular place, exposing the authority of immediate experience. This attempted expanded critical “reading” of Bruno’s projects has been informed predominantly by the essays on building and dwelling of Martin Heidegger, the modern-day thinker whose theory has often approached architectural thought and serves as a fine entry for the discovery of philosophy and architecture’s common interests and language; another important author who has taken up and developed several ideas of the German thinker is Christian Norberg-Schulz in his book 'Genius loci – towards a phenomenology of architecture', where he argues about the more existential aspects of architecture, once again placing an emphasis on the human experience of the built context.