Il recupero delle cattedrali dell'energia

Electricity has been the base for new technologies that have had, and still have, a significant impact on architecture, building design and people life. It is an industrial heritage, but above all a cultural heritage strong related to the territory and the population. Thanks to science and technology advances which took place in the last decades of the nineteenth century, lots of electrical power stations voted to the production of electricity, mainly used in the lighting of public spaces and buildings or in urban transport, are erected next to the urban centres. Many of these power plants, whose equipment generally used fossil fuels (mainly coal and diesel) for electricity production, have been progressively abandoned since the end of the seventies of the last century. Some of them have been totally demolished, others have conversely undergone interventions in which conservation and transformation requests have not always been adequately combined. This paper intends to focus on the critical analysis of some recent adaptive reuse interventions carried out on fallen into disuse power plants in the last decades of the twentieth century, highlighting the differences that characterize the outcomes of such interventions.