A Human Restoration. Architectural lessons from a border asylum

Starting from the double meaning that the verb "riparare" has in Italian, repairing and protecting, we compare architecture, which has always had the task of offering a shelter and which today proposes to readjust pre-existing structures and urban fabrics, and psychiatry, which in its history has claimed to repair the mind of the insane, protecting him, and at the same time society, through internment.
 The comparison between architecture and psychiatry is useful if we are planning the reuse of a former asylum, but it becomes essential if the asylum in question is the one where, in 1961, the battle for the rights of people with mental disorders was born and which, with the 1978 Basaglia law, banned an architectural typology, that of the psychiatric hospital, which had become a symbol of the denial of those rights. The history of this hospital, now Basaglia Park, marginal by definition - one of its edges coincides with the state border - and at the same time at the center of troubled crossings of cultures, identities and languages, makes it an emblematic place for the contemporary world.
 In this complexity it has been proposed to the reflection of more knowledge and different design practices.