The Tower within the Tower. Reuse and Resemantization of Torre Rinalda in Lecce

Abstract

Over the last two centuries, as a conscious culture of preservation developed, the notion of ruins has greatly polarized the opinion of architects. The pro-restoration camp considers ruins a fragment to be used for rebuilding lost structures, whereas supporters of conservation view them as the end of a building's life cycle. While these positions stem from opposite mindsets, they share the belief that they reflect a fundamental truth: for restorers, the truth of a building’s original wholeness; for conservators, the truth of the passing of time. What both positions have in common is the view that ruins are a testament to the past. However, ruins are more than that and, in many ways, different. They possess an oft-ignored evocative power that can give rise to a structure different from the original one. In other words, they can come back to life in a different form. This transformation can be of two kinds: the first kind ignores the history of the building and reduces its ruins to the status of a picturesque objet trouvé. The second kind, on the contrary, takes that very history into account, asking what role it can have in the present. This project for Torre Rinalda in Lecce — a watch tower built in the 16^th century that now lies in ruins—uses the latter approach, where the old building inspires the new one by generating a semantic shift that can be named “resemantization”.