The idea of “performance”, the almost mystical confidence in the persistence of certain values which are perennial, repetitive or at least inferred from a norm (typology, layout, procedure, ideology), and emerging always from a specific historic-physical context, has facilitate in certain architectures and approach to the project prepared from factors apparently consubstantial to the disciplinary discourse itself, derived from antecedent physical and cultural manifestations.

A methodology of clearly open-minded intentions and concerned with the detailed study of the surroundings rather than with the production of new images is synthesized in an exemplary way in the project for the reconstruction of the “Case di Stefano” in Gibellina. Indee, the operation tackles the problem of working on and old baglio (a fortified farm) from the XVIII and XIX centuries, practically destroyed by the effects of the 1968 earthquake.

The programme set out to recover the complex so that it could house a large local culture center. A close examination of the old building revealed its original U-shaped layout, with two parallel longitudinal wings for the farm’s auxiliary services, separated by a central patio with a well. At one end of the patio a large transversal construction, destined to house several private section and dependencies, assumed the figurative weight of the complex.