Considerations on the unfinished as the outcome of architectural restoration projects

The importance of keeping the visible traces of the previous life of a building when it is converted so as to host a new activity and/or new users constitutes an attitude that is being increasingly applied in the contemporary panorama of modern architecture. In accordance with this theme, new layers in the restoration project are added to the pre-existing ones, all of which clearly exhibited to constitute a new architectural assembly. The building is considered to be a combination of traces in which new and old elements of finishing, floors, windows, and plaster work deserve the same attention. The present contribution provides several examples of this theme in building restoration, a theme that aims to keep the memory of the architectural space alive by rejecting radical formulas for a new appearance and the pervasiveness of new finishings. This paper aims to verify the extraordinary integration of project and history on both the internal architectural scale and that of the city. The unfinished and the imperfect fundamentally correspond to the condition of our existence.