The Use of Composites in Architectural Restoration: Some Critical Considerations on the Theoretical Implications

The use of composites in the field of architectural restoration is becoming more and more widespread, because of the great technical advantages they convey in many cases. But applying these materials to the Cultural Heritage poses not only technical issues, common to all the applications on the same materials, but also artistic, historical and, more generally, cultural ones. The present paper faces these issues, starting with some considerations on how they were dealt with in history, when the “new” materials were iron, steel and reinforced concrete. Then, the specific problems posed by the composite materials are discussed and some examples are shown in order to identify the correct approach to the many different cases that can arouse in the field of architectural restoration. There isn’t a single right solution for each problem, but there is a right approach that starts from the comprehension of the building’s behavior, passes through a comparison of all the possible solutions and aims at finding the best equilibrium among the technical and theoretical issues for the single case study.