The volume Proto–Design for Disassembly: Compendium of Patents and Annotated Bibliography (ISBN 979-12-81583-43-6), published by Politecnico di Torino Press (February 2026), is issued as one of the research outputs of the project Upcycling Architecture in Italy. Forging and Promoting a Renewed Building Culture (PRIN PNRR 2022).

The publication presents the results of a two-year data mining investigation conducted by the research units of Sapienza Università di Roma and Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata. The research was supported by a scientific collaboration agreement signed between Archivio Centrale dello Stato (ACS), the Dipartimento di Architettura e Progetto (DiAP) of Sapienza Università di Roma, and the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Civile e Ingegneria Informatica (DICII) of Università degli Studi di Roma Tor Vergata (17 September 2024 – 17 September 2026), aimed at the valorization of the archival collection of architectural patents preserved within the Ufficio Italiano Brevetti e Marchi fund.

The volume explores dismantling-oriented design logics through a systematic analysis of invention patents and sector-specific journals. While Design for Disassembly (DfD) has been formally systematized in recent years — notably through the ISO 20887 standard on sustainability in buildings and civil engineering works — many of its operational principles resonate with technological and theoretical debates that emerged during the industrialization of construction in the second half of the twentieth century.

Through an extensive data mining process, more than 500 patent documents were identified and progressively filtered into a curated corpus of inventions dating from 1945 to 1980. The study reconstructs technological and design trajectories related to reuse, modular reversibility, and joint-based structural systems, highlighting historical continuities and discontinuities with contemporary Design for Disassembly approaches.

The volume is structured in two sections. The first presents the archival research on invention patents, including a selected repertory accompanied by critical reinterpretations. The second comprises an annotated bibliographic survey of six specialized journals, offering both quantitative and theoretical analysis of industrialized construction debates in post-war Italy.

Taken together, the patents and bibliographic references assembled in this compendium constitute a documentary repertoire that contributes to the historiographical and operational understanding of dismantling-oriented design practices.

The publication is available for consultation and download in Open Access at the following link