“As Found”. The Reuse of Existing Buildings with an Identity Character as a Fundamental Element of Regeneration in the New Community Centers’ Design. A Brutalist Building as a Case Study

Abstract

The places of primary health and social care, at a territorial level, can and must be, through their design, elements of community building and urban regeneration. Among the essential characteristics to direct the design actions towards this goal, it was decided to investigate the reuse of existing buildings with an identity character as a preferential location for the new Community Centers. The analysis of the case study of a building belonging to the Brutalist current, and originally inserted in a broader plan for a Civic Center, for which the re-functionalization in a Community Center is foreseen, becomes a pretext for a reasoning on the correlation between the health of the person and healthiness of the environment, on the need to think of each new project as an identity element for the citizen, as an individual and as a member of a community, and as a builder of new urban centralities, as well as on the active role that the community, with the help the designer, can have in the care of existing places and in the foreshadowing of future places.