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In our popular imagination pirates have plundered, robbed and killed but also embodied a worldview based on values of freedom and equality. They can help us to comprehend a new (and old) discipline: the art of appropriation. As it is, this art is applied while working on existing buildings and it constitutes a typical feature of the Italian architecture recognized everywhere. Perhaps after the failure of the big stories of the twentieth century we need to trigger small minimalistic utopias, and a way of thinking oriented to soul searching activities.

The current condition tells us that the past half-century city model is nowadays useless. It will take years, perhaps decades to recover it definitively, if the present economic scenario does not change its course. Decades of desertion, urban space deterioration and consequent social degradation.

Rather than let urban voids wait long for economic resources and appropriate uses, would it not be more logical to introduce a new life cycle between existing and forthcoming elements?

Therefore, it becomes necessary to review with humility and intelligence the way we design the city, radically changing the intervention methodology on urban modification.

Within the city, new actions  should be defined in order to reflect changes due on one hand to economic uncertainty and on the other to cycle-of-life, work, and entertainment briefness. These actions are intended to be linked to temporary reuse.

The temporary reuse is a new life-cycle of a building, a middle-earth  between old and new uses, awaiting economic resources that allow to act in a definitive way.

For this reason, the National Association of Architects, Urban Planners, Landscape Designer, and Conservators of Reggio Emilia - together with the Urban Regeneration Office of Reggio Emilia Municipality - has set a design workshop that could involve other associations and technical colleges to experience design methodologies for the temporary reuse of S. Croce district in Reggio Emilia. The outcome consists of simple and exact projects, realisable with self-construction techniques.

In this picture, one can find three out-of-fashion virtues that seem to be forgotten by architecture but, if rediscovered, may improve the design methodology – based on the principle that everything is temporary, nevertheless its consequences are permanent – and so the result. The three virtues are simplicity, accuracy, and technique.

Simplicity, which is different from simplification or regularisation , is a way to invite the architect, and therefore architecture, to favour necessity and essentiality instead of pure decoration. The easiest way to assign simplicity is by a sensible reduction. Reduce the unnecessary, using less to achieve more, is an ethical principle at every level of life.

Furthermore, accuracy is the idea of serving a specific cause, rather than the concept of measurement precision, although fundamental to the practise of architecture.

Accurate, in this way, means effective, chosen, and defined. The pursuit of accuracy means to combine the efficiency of technological research with the effectiveness of architectural composition choices.

In addition, the act of building signifies establishing a technical order: the technique has to regain its role to strengthen the concepts of contemporary, durability, adaptability, flexibility and disassembly at the end of service-life. It corresponds to the idea of a design by layers, which can be identified by the designer and recognizable by the user.

A design by layers has a simple and immediate character and it is perceived to last and to be reversible over time. It is flexible because it can adapt to various existing means, it is coherent as it creates a sense of belonging and recognisability, and it is clear as long as it is well known to all actors involved. Each layer has its own function, a durability and an economic impact.

Villa Correr Pisani was built next to the Montello hill and is located near the historic centre of Montebelluna. This historic building has been developed since the mid-sixteenth century and it represented one of the largest Venetian family residences on the mainland.

At the moment, unfortunately, the building appears almost abandoned, trapped and relegated to a marginal urban environment. Moreover, the fragmentation of spaces and the many changes made in the past, make it impossible to use without an appropriate intervention. This means taking into consideration the historical importance of this building, the design choices should be guided by architectural knowledge, from it's material analysis and construction system, to see how the architecture has responded to the time changes and it's crucial to understand what the best intervention strategy is to safeguard its integrity. It's on this footing that the idea of knowledge is introduced as a tool for intervention, becoming a common thread among the consolidation operation, material conservation and the recovery of lost knowledge in how the spaces were put to use. The executive definition of detail allows the maintaining of integration between the existing structures and the proposed work of the project; this is the moment where everything comes together. The object is to maximise conservation of history and the identity of the building while minimising contemporary interference.

The national Codes concerning seismic risk prevention suggest a methodology aiming to obtain an adequate knowledge of existing constructions; that knowledge is the necessary basis for the design of rehabilitaton/upgrading/improvement interventions. That approach is particularly relevant when referring to cultural heritage; in fact, in that case safety a conservation become both the main goal. Therefore only an accurate knowledge may allow sustainable interventions, namely interventions able to transmit to the future generations the intact testimony of the past. The above methodology has been applied to the artifact known as “Casa del Mutilato di Lecce”, built during the fascist period.  In the paper the different stages of the knowledge will be briefly reported; the followed approach and the obtained results may be considered as a significant start point for future sustainable design of interventions regarding the analysed artifact; in addition it could be an effective format to be possible extended to similar buildings in terms of historical, architectonical and structural features.