A CONSCIOUS TOMORROW: The significant power of fragility
Publication date: 17.07.2025
This is an article by Nora Santonastaso, translated and slightly adapted by Jan Hoffman
A conscious future is taking shape in architectural projects that aim to restore even the most complex structures, such as those that were once symbols of segregation and loneliness. This is done in an ethical and sustainable way.
The former Santa Maria della Pietà psychiatric hospital complex is undergoing extensive restoration. The aim is to reconnect the spaces with the neighbourhood, through the introduction of community services.
Welcome to a new instalment of ARCHITECT@WORK's thematic series A Conscious Tomorrow. This series explores how architecture can be a tool for reinterpreting and enhancing ancient places steeped in memory, establishing an intense dialogue between past, present and future. Today's story emphasises the meaning of the adjective conscious even more strongly, as we discuss the regeneration of former psychiatric facilities, often veritable cities within cities, with a view to conscious, community-oriented urban transformation.
Former psychiatric hospitals still bear the architectural imprint of one of the most controversial and dark chapters in Italian urban and healthcare history. Originally designed as places where care took on the connotation of confinement, segregation and control, these architectural complexes were enclaves of marginality for decades. Here, the word margin defines two characteristics: construction on the outskirts of the city but also, and above all, on the margins of the collective consciousness.
Santa Maria della Pietà in Rome is one of the most emblematic cases in this history. It was built at the end of the 19th century, according to a design by Edgardo Negri and Silvio Chiera. It had to function as a provincial mental hospital and was laid out in a series of pavilions immersed in a park covering over 40 hectares. In doing so, the facility followed the principles of the time, which interpreted therapy as isolation and physical and functional separation and made the lives of the thousands of patients who lived there every day invisible.
The original design of Santa Maria della Pietà organised the hospital facilities into pavilions within a green area of over 40 hectares.
More than forty years after the Basaglia Law (Law 180 of 1978), the fate of these spaces has become central to the debate on the reuse of abandoned urban heritage. Today, Santa Maria della Pietà is at the centre of a complex and gradual restoration programme promoted by the Region and the Municipality. The aim is a complete multifunctional conversion of the pavilions and the large surrounding outdoor areas. However, due to the historical and monumental constraints that protect them, this raises the level of the design challenge and focuses it on the compatibility between conservation, regulatory compliance and the overall needs of the new intended uses.
The master plan, which is still evolving, envisages the coexistence of social and health functions, temporary student accommodation, cultural spaces and local services for the neighbourhood. The explicit aim of the project is to break down barriers, i.e. to overcome the closed-circle mentality and return this precious and dense fragment of the city to those around it, activating processes of social regeneration and collective reappropriation of public property.
The Santa Maria della Pietà park is freely accessible from morning to sunset. Strolling along the green, tree-lined avenues, you come across numerous murals, such as the one by Gomez de Teran entitled ‘Le cose che non si vedono’ (Things you cannot see).
Today, the Santa Maria della Pietà complex already houses health facilities and association headquarters in some of its pavilions, as well as the Museum of the Mind (Museo della Mente) in Pavilion 6. The park is freely accessible from morning to sunset, and as you walk through it, you will come across numerous murals that decorate the facades of the old pavilions in a particularly evocative and meaningful way.
Similar cases across Europe confirm that the regeneration of former psychiatric hospitals is a complex but particularly fertile area for the growth of culture and ethical and social awareness. The Paolo Pini in Milan is now a well-established example of this. Since 1996, thanks to the Cooperativa Olinda, the complex has been undergoing a new lease of life as a cultural and social hub, with theatre spaces, urban gardens, a hostel and an inclusive restaurant, while maintaining its pavilion structure surrounded by greenery.
London-based studio JTP carried out the restoration and redevelopment of Graylingwell Park, a former hospital site. The park is home to 472 trees subject to landscape protection restrictions and some historic buildings.
Similar projects are underway or have already been completed in Europe, from Graylingwell Park in Chichester (Great Britain) to Jydske Asyl in Aarhus (Denmark). These are former psychiatric hospitals that have been converted into residential and multi-purpose neighbourhoods and public spaces.
These examples demonstrate that the redevelopment of architectural complexes with this specific previous function is not simply a matter of building conservation. It is at the same time a process of radically rethinking the relationship between architecture, landscape and the community, and a tool for healing old fragilities.