“HISTORIC PLANTS AS MONUMENTS” PRESERVING, RE-THINKING AND RE-USING HISTORIC PLANTS

This paper would like to illustrate how the preservation of historical plants is not only necessary to attest the technological evolution of the plants themselves in relation to the changing ways of life and to the life of buildings, but also that they can sometimes be re-employed depending on their typology through the use of new technological products, taking advantages from their potentiality. Since the beginning of modern theories on restoration, in the first half of the XIX Century, it seems that the problem of the introduction of modern plants in historic buildings has been explicitly treated on few occasions. More than a century and a half later, several "generations" of plants have been installed in historic buildings or in buildings which have meanwhile become historic, and a more attentive attitude has been developed, consisting in the preservation rather than the restoration of ancient architecture, and rethinking that attitude seems as important, as accepting the fact that plants themselves have become important documents that have to be preserved.