Retrofitting practices: an opportunity to “re-design” the urban built heritage.

The contemporary city, heritage of modern architecture and its theories, compared to the historical and consolidated city, is the product of urban areas that are like "islands" (B. Secchi). This building heritage is insufficient to the current comforts and architectural standards due to building and design processes that refer to the principles of "industrialization" and architecture standardization. This condition was caused by the housing “requirements” of the second post-war period. This architectural and urban heritage requires a reinterpretation and updating through the contemporary standards, to reintegrating suburbs within the social and urban system. In this context, the designer, starting from formal aspects of architecture and social problems, define building and urban requalification through architectural retrofitting: recovery with the current standard requirements for safety and comfort. This theme, highly current and oriented in the professional future, also requires attention in didactic not only to architectural design and building and urban recovery, but also to the disciplines of representation. In fact, through this discipline, the process of retrofitting is as an opportunity for reading, analyzing and reinterpreting the existing poor-quality building through the survey, reading, understanding and re-design of architecture.