Abstract
The Italian school infrastructure has suffered in recent decades from an immobility that has generated critical issues and shortcomings in the management of structures, safety adjustments, and innovations in the architectural and pedagogical model. This type of stasis, due to the scarcity of resources on a national scale and the decrease in the birth rate of the country, has meant that the buildings are largely inadequate from both a regulatory and socio/pedagogical point of view, with a level of degradation that is leading to a progressive abandonment of several structures, generating further insecurity at the urban level. In Italy, the current health emergency (SARS-CoV-2), with the necessity of wider spaces for social distancing and less numerous classes, has further highlighted the strongly problematic nature of an extensive and often obsolete school building heritage, raising the need to reevaluate heritage in terms of safety, accessibility, economic impact, and, last but not least, social cohesion. The paper proposes an approach that starts from the analysis of regulations and data on a national scale related to the structural and formal conditions of school buildings, interpreting and evaluating their safety with a holistic approach, to then proceed to the definition of a design survey matrix able to classify the selected cases and give an interpretative reading that includes the vastest number of characterizing factors. The Italian territory (between Abruzzo, Lazio, and Umbria) affected by the 2016 and 2017 earthquakes has been selected as a significant case study due to its obvious conditions of further criticality for the formulation of an evaluation methodology through an extensive field survey, cross-referenced with available data on the resilience of school structures and their role in the urban fabric, with the ultimate aim of identifying functional methods for their adaptation to a contemporary, safe, flexible, and shared school model with local communities.
Highlights
When a country has to deal with the consequences of an event that profoundly affects its territory and its inhabitants, be it situations of war or natural disasters, the first actions needed to bring peace between the state and local communities and to support the populations affected by the crisis situation are concentrated on the rehabilitation of public buildings, their “securing”, and the reactivation of the services they provide
The architectural project assumes an organizational role of the system, identifying decisive elements with a particular focus on the reuse of space and detail, which become architecture together with retrofitting and regulatory adaptation, transforming works that were supposedly based on technical adaptations into an opportunity for formal redefinition that is capable of significant impacts on the territory
The Anagrafe dell’Edilizia Scolastica (AES; National Registry of School Buildings) has been developed with open data by the MIUR, the Italian Ministry of Education, Universities, and Research, to make the data relating to each individual school transparent and public through the portal of the MIUR so as to be able to promptly identify buildings in need of immediate intervention
Summary
When a country has to deal with the consequences of an event that profoundly affects its territory and its inhabitants, be it situations of war or natural disasters, the first actions needed to bring peace between the state and local communities and to support the populations affected by the crisis situation are concentrated on the rehabilitation of public buildings, their “securing”, and the reactivation of the services they provide. The definition of choices that are consistent with the objectives of sustainability—or rather quality, a term that is abused and difficult to define—to which architects are urgently turning derive from the need to establish at least some guidelines that can protect a certain architectonic and urban quality (in Italy, the guidelines for architectural quality are being approved by Mibact, the Ministry of Cultural Heritage, Activities, and Tourism, and Cnappc, the National Council of Architects, Planners, Landscape Architects, and Conservationists) These objectives set by the political agendas of states and the European Community are crucial to formulate survey methodologies that take into account the different variables (such as the possibility of social interrelation within the school and between school and the urban environment, the perception of security, the relationship between nature and architecture, etc.) so as not to restrict the identification of qualitative parameters in purely quantitative formulations determined by economic assessments, such as the use of the Life Cycle Assessment approach, certifications such as LEED rating system of the American Green Building Council, or impacts and indices calculated by sophisticated software [13]. The interpretative design reading, developed through the filter of a created survey matrix that is useful for categorizing the necessary interventions, is applied to a series of case studies—a defined number of Italian schools in a state of physical and functional degradation—to test their effectiveness in supporting the pinpointing of design strategies capable of making a change, transforming these public buildings into spaces of social, innovative, and inclusive gathering, and identification
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