Restoration and Renovation of the Ex Fornaci Picci Industrial Complex in Quartu Sant’Elena

Abstract

Every architectural intervention, even the most innovative, engages with a pre-existing context: a built and layered reality that is not simply preserved, but interpreted and transformed. Architecture draws upon the history and memory of places and, in the dialogue between past and present, becomes the expression of a continuous process of evolution, capable of renewing the built environment and redefining the very meaning of tradition. According to E.N. Rogers, tradition and innovation are not opposing terms: the project may be understood as a transition from one form to another, as the search for a synthesis between the registers of the pre-existing, the new, and their reciprocal relationship.

The regeneration of the Ex Fornaci Picci is situated within this perspective. The old industrial complex is not treated as a mere relic, but as a structure of memory capable of accommodating new urban, social, and landscape relationships. Its adaptive reuse reactivates the productive trace of the place through collective functions, cultural spaces, services, shared workspaces, associative activities, and forms of social housing. The transformation does not erase the pre-existing fabric, but takes it as the matrix of a new public landscape. The park, composed of mineral and vegetal surfaces, squares, and pathways, becomes the device through which spaces and uses are brought into relation. The cycle path crosses the area as a continuous thread, reconnecting it to the urban network and returning to the city a place where industrial memory, innovation, and collective life find a new synthesis.