ACCESSIBILITY TO CULTURAL HERITAGE AS A DESIGN CHALLENGE

This essay discusses some topics and presents some elements of my personal ‘food for thought’ concerning accessibility and its challenging but stimulating relationship with cultural heritage. The key idea is that accessibility is a multidimensional concept covering all human activities. From an architectural point of view, accessibility is a way of thinking about architecture based on the centrality of the human being in his/her distinct specific circumstances and features and a highly creative discipline that can stimulate the imagination and the search for new spatial and functional design solutions able to create new ways and opportunities to experience, know, and understand the world around us. This creativity can find a peculiar application field precisely in cultural heritage places, where access strategies and design solutions have to balance the right to knowledge and experience expressed by people and the identity and values that cultural assets represent and bear witness to. Here, accessibility is both a bridge towards culture and beauty and an opportunity for improving the civic and economic well-being of a community.