“Historic plants as monuments” preserving, rethinking and re-using historic plants

Abstract Since the beginning of modern theories on restoration, in the first half of the 19th century, it seems that the problem of technological plants in historic buildings has been explicitly treated on few occasions. More than one and a half century 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. This paper would like to illustrate why the preservation of historical plants is necessary, not only to attest the technological evolution of the plants themselves in relation to the changing ways of life and the life of buildings, but also to attest that they can sometimes be re-employed depending on their typology through the use of new technological products, drawing advantage from their potentiality.