Project of Conservation of Colonia Elioterapica in Legnano near Milan
Dates: 8th to 15th December, 2017
Venues: The Politecnico di Milano (POLIMI) in Milan + Florence / Venice, Italy
Event: Project of Conservation of Colonia Elioterapica in Legnano near Milan
Format: Joint Workshop between POLIMI and IDS
Instructors: Nora Lombardini, Associate Professor / Elena Fioretto, Polimi, and Nick Shavishvili, IDS
Photo credits © Facebook page “Legnano in Bianco e Nero”
A travel to Italy by a group of the best students selected form the two of previous workshops in Tbilisi (David Mack’s on comic books and Van der Steen / O'Brien’s on Tbilisi ethnography) included Milan, Florence and Venice sightseeing, a short visit to another leading Italian architecture and design school – IUAV in Venice, a POLIMI lecture by Nick Shavishvili titled “Rejecting Traditional City, Fabricating False Eclectics: Is There any Hope in a Dystopic Climate of Tbilisi?”, and finally, the two-day joint workshop on Colonia Elioterapica in Legnano, the example of the Italian Modernism of the 1930’s. The BBPR complex has already been the subject of an IDS event – the 28 April case study of a possible enhancement of Modern Heritage and its environment presented in Tbilisi by Prof. Lombardini and Assist. Fioretto
As the class at POLIMI is a restoration studio, the project for the workshop was chosen as a conservation of the existing building and its re-use. The main issue for the students was to conserve, as a historical document, the traces of the past inside the building. The plasters on the wall are very damaged, and the red traces by the BBPR Group are intangible. The green traces are of the period after the Second World War and the black traces are left by a fire.
During the joint workshop, the IDS students worked with 47 POLIMI students divided into 15 groups aiming to assess and possibly define the aesthetic final solution for the conservation project. Results were discussed in Milan on 14 December during the final session of the workshop, and on 20 December presented by the IDS students to their colleagues in Tbilisi.