The long career of Aurelio Galfetti – one of the most important names of the so-called Ticino school with, among others, Luigi Snozzi, Mario Botta, Flora Ruchat-Roncati and Livio Vacchini – has encompassed since the early 1960s a multiplicity of places, scales and types of intervention, still Canton Ticino, Switzerland, has always constituted a center of gravity for his work and research. There, in Mendrisio, he would found the Academy of Architecture with Botta; there he had realized, with Ruchat, the sculptural landscape complex of the Bagno di Bellinzona; and there, in Bellinzona, Galfetti was commissioned in the early 80s to restore and reactivate one of the three castles surrounding the city. The result of such operation is a peculiar positioning within the discourse on theory and practice of restoration: the intervention does not affect the buildings only, but also the whole hill below – making it bare rock where it faces an urban square, and vineyards on the other sides – while the project, where it does not directly hide inside the rock, does show very little attempt to be mimetic, it gives instead a very strong contemporary expression to the whole complex. When the work was completed, in June 1993, Domus published Castelgrande on issue 750.

We are interested in the restoration of Castelgrande firstly inasmuch as Galfetti has utilized the disciplinary tools of architectural design for a specific restoration purpose. The project is applied by directly involving what exists and not, as often happens, by operating next to it. Memory is thus an object and instrument of the project itself, the relation between old and new is insoluble. This attitude in practice treats restoration as one of the outlets of the normal design process, in other words mainly as an active and not a passive, a creative and not a technical operation; an attitude in short which fully entitles restoration to participate in the discipline of architecture as a whole.

Castelgrande, one of Bellinzona’s three castles, stands on a rocky hill, its long walls embracing the town centre. Its morphology and lack of functions had however steadily separated it from that centre. The question therefore was to restore this fortification to the town. Galfetti decided to work on the whole hill, in keeping with the urban dimension to be assumed by the project. He began by completely clearing the rock of the vegetation that had grown over it and was preventing perception of the castle from below. 

Thus on the east side a big rocky wall acts as the castle’s facade towards the town, marking the history of the place in a geological sense, and casting doubt as to whether it is a natural or an artificial element. On the other side, the craggy ground, to offset the difference of level, is laid out with vineyard terraces, the geometry of which is tensed between existing curves. So the new landscape is constructed, designed; and composed of only three elements: lawn, rock and wall. The park extends round the castle on top of its rock-hill and sports just three trees, almost as objects on exhibition, precise features of the new design according to a representation which once again induces a mixture and inversion of the concepts of artificial and natural.

The castle is approached by walking along its walls, or up the path round the hill, or by a lift shaft cut into the rockface (the main entrance). A splendid example of excavated - not constructed - architecture, this access necessitates penetrating the rock-face through a slot where even light has difficulty in getting in. The use of the lift here, which normally denies the perception of distances by abolishing the space-time relation, is skilfully transformed into an architectural journey. At the top lift exit, a wide ramp dividing the castle walls from an embankment wall of the new open terrace, leads to the broad central space set out as a lawn overlooked by all the constructions. 

The plastered fronts give it almost the character of a square, but the extreme rigidity of the whole is more abstract than urban, with the poetically solitary tree and on the other side the two late medieval towers, emphasized by the decisive new horizontal plan. All the built parts, including the historically less important ones, have also been restructured by completions or reproductions. The main block comprises three elements: the polygonal south wing (15th-17th c); the ex-arsenal wing, a single parallelipiped (19th c), and finally a connecting, higher part between the two (later 19th c). Located in the latter is the entrance to all the different facilities, which are: a restaurant and a conference/banqueting hall (ex-arsenal); a history museum and a bar (south wing). 

The atrium is a single high-ceilinged area created by the removal of floor slabs, showing traces on the city side wall of different layers of history. Its roofing is heavily pitched to solve the difference in heights of the two fronts (city side and on the courtyard). This technical problem is the clue to its architectural expression. In fact a canvas hung from the ceiling gives a sense of movement to this space, connoting it in a particular way, and basically identifies its intermediate character between the two wings. The restaurant and museum are organized as linear sequences of rooms, with few apertures as points of view towards the town. The interiors are characterized through materials - cement and natural stone - which are matched with an elegance of proportion, form and colour.

The wood, too, utilized for the new floor slabs, is painted black to correspond to the colour scale of greys only (from white to black) which distinguishes the whole project. It is the plasticity of concrete and the linearity of stone that define an architecture - made of material - which makes no distinction between original, reconstructed or designed structure. This is an approach very different for example, to that adopted in the restoration of another castle in Bellinzona in the 1970s by Campi, Pessina and Piazzoli, where the new work was sharply separated from the old. It is not a current trend but a definite part of Galfetti’s philosophy. For him conservation always means transformation, and so restoration is not just revival but above all adjustment. To restore also means to render places usable. The contemporariness of every transformation is created by its functional fulfilment of contemporary needs. These considerations are clearly not applicable to monuments whose architectural importance prevails over function. But they do apply in an instance like that of Castelgrande, where a useless and crumbling defence structure is converted into a recreational one. 

The creative restoration, in contrast to that of conservation is also spatial, furthermore establishing an architecture-function, though not a form-content link. A creative restoration works on historical substance, without looking upon it as untouchable and sacred. After all, what does authenticity of the ancient mean? What is ancient? Where is the limit?

Castelgrande is a body of countless successive works and alterations probably begun four thousand years ago, each dictated by the necessities and culture of its time. Galfetti’s is simply the important trace left by the late 20th century, and it won’t be the last. Today this work - thanks also to political determination - makes a concrete contribution to Bellinzona. From the top of a hill it establishes, as a public place, a strong architectural and social bond with the town, and becomes its chief landmark. A new acropolis.