The Projects of the Ufficio Centro Storico After the Master Plans of Giovanni Astengo and Giuseppe Campos Venuti in Ancona in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century

The Centro Storico Office in Ancona, established in the mid-1970s following the earthquake that struck the city in 1972, was confronted with a long series of critical urban issues that had remained unresolved since the bombing during the Second World War. The young designers lived through a particularly lively phase in the Marche capital’s urban and architectural history, characterised in particular from an urban planning point of view by the regulatory plans coordinated in the 1950s by Giovanni Astengo and in the 1970s by Giuseppe Campos Venuti. In addition to these two internationally renowned planners, many architects who worked on the different sections of the historic centre in Ancona in those years, even if not always with realised projects, found space in the city. From the early seventies, in the Guasco-San Pietro and Capodimonte neighbourhoods, there was a succession of philological restoration works, coordinated in particular by the local officials of the Cultural Heritage Agency, with projects characterised by extremely modern languages that were inserted in a sometimes contrasting way in some of the oldest areas of the city of Ancona.