• abandonment
• adaptive reuse
• architectural heritage
• conservation
• cultural value
• disused buildings
• Eastern Europe
• former Eastern Bloc
• globalization
• historical heritage
• Katowice
• late-modernist architecture
• obsolescence
• Poland
• post-war socialist architecture
• Silesia
• temporary use
• urban shrinkage

The thesis here presented has as its object of study that particular existing disused built environment of highly obsolescence for which, in the short-medium term, a demand for use is not identifiable. The obsolescence that characterizes it cannot be considered as a transitional phase, but presents itself as a structural condition of contemporary society since it directly depends on the broader global processes of restructuring of productive, social and economic systems that in literature are called Urban Shrinkage. This large category of properties, widely spread throughout the world and destined to grow, is therefore outside the range of action of the dynamics of regeneration and reuse since at the moment there is no real demand for its use and, thus, it is no longer reasonable to think of being able to achieve its recovery through traditional strategies. To answer these questions and with the aim of transforming the problematic linked to this heritage into a resource for the territory, an intervention strategy has been developed that prescinds the re-functionalization and deals with the intermediate phase between the abandonment of the obsolete building and its future reuse. The proposed approach has been identified with the term Building Freezing, to highlight how the decision to undertake conservation interventions coexists with that of predicting the absence of functions, aiming at freezing the building in the current conditions of degradation in such a way that it can satisfy any new uses in a future that cannot be determined yet. The strategy then materialized in the analysis and application to a case study, the Silesian Scientific Institute scientific research center in Katowice, Poland: testimony of the socialist historical period, it was built in 1972 and, since its disposal in 1992, has no longer found its new use, currently pouring into critical conditions of degradation. The strategy then materialized in the analysis and application to a case study, the Silesian Scientific Institute scientific research center in Katowice, Poland: testimony of the socialist historical period, it was built in 1972 and, since its disposal in 1992, has no longer found its new use, currently pouring into critical conditions of degradation. This building is representative of what has just been discussed in various respects, first of all its location: like the whole former Soviet bloc, polish territory, and especially the historic Silesia productive region of which it is the capital, is severely shrinking in economic and social terms after the political transition of 1989-1991.Through a careful analysis of the literature available on the subject and of the building itself, it was possible to demonstrate how it is part of the architectural heritage worthy of protection as an expression of the architectural movement, widely recognized as such, of Brutalism, and part of the so-called Dissonant Heritage, namely that heritage whose founding values are in strong ideological contrast with the current society, such as the places of memory or, in our case, the buildings resulting from the imposition of the Soviet regime. Despite these assumptions, the architectural and historical value of the case study has not yet been recognized and its permanent disposal has led the building to a state of obsolescence close to the critical limit of definitive compromise that threatens its imminent demolition. The objective of this second part is therefore to test the innovativeness of the method and its effective applicability to the case study, to demonstrate its compatibility with the conservation and protection of the building and its testimonial values. Applying to the building in question the intervention scenarios in which the Building Freezing strategy is articulated, temporary uses compatible with the level of accessibility achieved were then proposed, demonstrating how it is actually possible to preserve the heritage without this being directly dependent on its re-functionalization. In the light of the extensive study of the bibliographic sources cited so far and after careful reflection on the recent global dynamics of health and humanitarian emergencies, a relative scenario of temporary use focused on emergency uses has been compatibly developed for each scenario of intervention. This radical choice shows how obsolete heritage can represent an effective and real resource for the territory in which it is inserted because it is able to respond promptly to sudden and urgent uses such as recent global crises, whose immediate demand for large occupiable spaces can be satisfied by an availability of obsolete assets in disuse increasingly widespread in every region of the world.