Dai valori alle pratiche: le oscillazioni del processo di patrimonializzazione di un’architettura del secondo Novecento. La Fabbrica per spogliatoi e mensa di Marcello D’Olivo a Trieste / From values to practices: shifting stances in preservation process of a late 20th-century architecture. Marcello D'Olivo's Fabbrica per spogliatoi e mensa in Trieste

Abstract

Added to the Docomomo Italia catalogue in 2016, Marcello D'Olivo’s (1921-1991) Fabbrica per spogliatoi e mensa was built between 1957 and 1958 in the port area of Trieste and soon abandoned. The declaration of cultural interest, issued on 28 January 2009 (one of the first in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region), comes after fifty years of abandonment and oblivion following the closure of the shipyard in 1972. The preservation process is based on the recognition of the cultural value identified – uncritically – in the authority and authorship of the architect's work. This does not exempt the supervisory bodies from validating a radical transformation project that includes elements ‘unworthy because they belong to the industrial production of the 1950s’. Beyond the specific case, the Trieste experience refers to a much broader scenario involving the conservation process in its decisive relationship with the tools and practices of late 20th-century architecture, which have proved to be absent here.