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Architects are being asked nowadays to interpret the expectation of school innovation. Ample room for research and further knowledge and skills is possible, starting from the evidence of the many errors made in the past in the oversight of building performance and referring to a large number of recent projects at an international level. All this, however, is not enough unless it is accompanied by openness to dialogue with the educational scholars and, above all, with the “inhabitants” of schools. This article presents a scenario on the transdisciplinary and participatory approach in the research and design of new learning environments and questions the potential and limits of innovation in school design.

The paper concerns the project, promoted by Metropolitan city and Polytechnic university of Milan, of returning to public use Torre delle Sirene – seat of the Milan air-raid alert control unit – and Bunker della Prefettura. Two buildings connected to each other and very significant as memories of the Second World War and, most of all, of the ordinary life of civilian people under siege, a condition still regarding so many people around the world at present. Both the buildings have been neglected and deteriorated since a few years, but they still preserve traces of the past use. The reopening project is difficult due both to the typological and location characters of the buildings and to the lack of available financial resources. The objective of the project is to transform the former central point of the air-raid defence system into the epicentre of a new collective alert system on the topic of war, operating through memories of the past. Moreover, this could become the centre of a wider and widespread heritage system of local air-raid shelters: a network of material and immaterial goods organized by the common logic of enhancing memory, in order to strengthen the culture of peace and realize in the city a cultural itinerary based on historical values.

This paper deals with the building performance evaluation, as a methodological approach to the analysis of existing building systems, aimed at supporting the decision-making process for rehabilitation and / or adaptive reuse. It presents a critical review of national and international studies and enlightens the different conditions and ways of application, in the case of empty buildings compared to those in use. In conclusion, it introduces some limits of such methodologies with respect to appropriate knowledge objectives when applied to buildings with particular or magnificent characters, as well as some possible research lines to be explored so to overcome them.

The study deals with the San Siro public housing neighbourhood in Milan, whose size and amount of issues make the district as a system in itself disjointed to the urban context. Features and conditions of this area, would require an hard work (and simultaneously offered great opportunities) for researching and field-testing innovative solutions for building and social rehabilitation of the great public housing settlements, as originally outlined in the «Neighbourhood Contracts». On the contrary, funds assigned to this complex by the second competition for «Neighbourhood Contracts», doesn’t seem to have started any innovative process of intervention on built environment, but rather letting an involutional model.