San Francesco Church
Mirandola (MO)
Year: 2020
Client: Segretariato Regionale per l’Emilia Romagna
Location: Mirandola (MO)
Performance: final and executive design for the Restoration of the Church of San Francesco.
Status: in progress (projecting contest awarded)
Architectural, structural and facilities projecting: Gnosis Progetti
The choices concerning the conservation and restoration of the religious artefact have been developed on the
basis of the ‘principles’
that have been internationally agreed upon in the last century in official conservation documents and guideline standards, and which, in the light of the current debate, represent the most shared strand of thediscipline of architectural restoration
.
Since the end of the 19th century, the choice of reconstruction in style with no distinction between the
Consistent with this awareness, the design team chose to foresee a
new and the pre-existing
has been considered by the Italian debate to be an unacceptable falsification that benefits neither the conservation of the existing nor the understanding of the values and meanings of the ancient building that connote it as a protected ‘monument’.Consistent with this awareness, the design team chose to foresee a
very careful restoration
and conservation work of the parts that survived the earthquake and, therefore, for the parts to be rebuilt, it chose to make the contemporary interventions ‘recognisable’ and ‘distinguishable’. Graduating the quality and distinguishability of the new from the pre-existing is the key, among many necessary ones, that distinguishes a good restoration from one of poorer quality.
The reconstruction of the collapsed parts appears as a delicate work of “mending” out of simplistic re-styling of the antique.
The
The parts of brickwork will be made of brick of a similar size and colour to that which has survived; to make the
The
spatial conformation
of the rooms is not changed, but the collapsed parts of the vaults are reconstructed using wooden purlins.The parts of brickwork will be made of brick of a similar size and colour to that which has survived; to make the
contemporary intervention distinguishable
from the outside the contemporary intervention, the reconstructed brickwork will have a slight “vibration” created by staggering the brickwork laying lines by a few centimetres, in alternating horizontal courses.
