Guardare oltre il tempo

Abstract

We are convinced that the arguments surrounding the dissolution of place tend toward the materialization of a city which continues to amass atopic architectures, architectures that facilitate the spectacularism of their forms and where the spatial rupture of the city becomes more discernible. On the other hand, the vindication of the architectural creative process as anti-historical creates forms of rupture and discomfort, and empowers a new, merely functionalist, vision. Today architecture is seen as subsidiary to other branches of knowledge, and, despite its exuberant forms, it retains an illusory autonomy, confined by assumptions that surpass and depreciate it. Contemporary architecture must reclaim the notion of perpetuity and permanence, so as to create new memories and contribute to the maintenance of collective references that solidify our current history’s forms and the forms of a growing city increasingly difficult to identify. We are interested in the order that we can find by way of examples that feature a ‘genomic’ sequence, a structure capable of establishing the continuity of facts that throughout history have determined and configured the city in so many ways. By means of a dichotomous cause and effect process, we may also describe the contemporary city’s form by clarifying the form of public spaces (their design and position – an operative grammar) and the relation and articulation between public spaces (an order – an efficient syntax).