Festival dell'architettura

Abstract
Paper tends to highlight relationships between the twentieth-century inspiration to discontinua urbani and the dispositio. On the base premise focused on three relevant issues (value of the centre, relationship discontinuous order / artefact identity, transferring modes of contextual conditions into discontinuous spatiality), text deepens heteronomous principle and selective method as contents whose have characterized contributions by some Italian School masters of the second half of the last century.

Positional configurations, transferring modes of urban and geographical values, the various links of discontinuous belong to dispositio as theme, an “open question” in debate about construction of contemporary city. 

Themes about composition by distinct elements – included in vitruvian dispositio and albertian collocatio – find new lymph through a part of architectural culture of the Twentieth Century aspiring to discontinuous and open order to effectively solve relationships with dis-measure and so whit geographical context. As some theorists of Groszstadt (Hilberseimer) state the trend toward openness – that will make possible a city made up of separations and structured through opens spaces – will involve status of architecture and city and will constitute the theoretical base of a significant urban application field about “open city in nature” and open institutional places (Hilberseimer, Mies, Le Corbusier). In this framework, urban theories of Eighteenth Century – with ledouxian motto “come back to principle, consult the nature, everywhere man is isolated” – tending to define qualities of autonomy (Kaufmann) and variety, will represent an ideal bridge between classical treaties and this modern sensibility and will define cultural conditions for recognizing the fecundity of some ancient urban models (Hilberseimer, Le Corbusier) as for example Pergamon in which the Pericle’s program of decentralization of equipment has been conducted. Inclination towards an architecture of discontinuity (Cohen 1983) goes beyond the first half of last century and, albeit with modified conditions and historical instances, is fed in Europe in Eighties and Nineties by critical essays by Cohen, Lucan, M. de Solà Morales anticipated in Italy by significant theoretical-design contributions (including those by Polesello, Samonà, Renna and Monestiroli).

Aspiration to discontinua urbani (Polesello’s memory) seems today particularly appropriate if we consider the budget on the contemporary city in which there are two dynamics: the persistence of a concentric and continuous system and based on a private-natured nineteenth-century model (in polarized cases in which we have a centre with a medium-high density) and the affirmation of a "discretized city" similar to a "trellis" (Purini) deriving from a chain of adjacent regions with variegated formal, qualitative and temporal conditions, whose limits involuntarily define temporary morphologies (in territories-cities, medium-low density). This scenery seems to induce an operational reflection about dispositio that can find application ambits not as much in urban general order, but probably in urban ambits to be reformulated (disposed sites, incomplete areas, …) that can constitute an effective occasion offered by contemporary city. A real applicative domain for project, whose collocation potentialities of “architecture of field” we have highlighted in 2007 (Costanzo 2007). 

Starting from this premise, it could be interesting to focus some compositional issues about dispositio in linkage with real city conditions.

1) The commonality of isolated facts, the way through which architectures find a "tension that binds" (Plato), can still happen through the recognition of centre’s value. This value in the past assumed symbolic connotations (Athens Ceramico Agorà) and today it poses interesting reflections in terms of its own “loss”, to use a Hans Sedlmayr expression. Today we intend the individuation of centre in a tangible sense, a theme on which modern culture worked activating continuous perfection and formal dismantling processes that highlight “a certain disinterestedness for the regularization” (Martin) reinforcing the modern open character open of delimitation. We refer not only to the paradigmatic case of Chandigarh Esplanade but also to the story of Tokyo Museum by Le Corbusier.

2) Using the well-known terms of LC for the annotation of Pisa in 1934, we can comment the compositional correspondence between the "tumulte dans l'ensemble" of the city and the ''unité dans le détail" of artefacts. Can we still talk about the consequentiality between urban discontinuous order and stylistic unity (as in Campo dei Miracoli and as Monestiroli today proposes)? A well-known issue in composition as discipline concerning the formal and stylistic characterization of the building depending on the position and role. If we start from the Leonardo’s assumption – “always a building want to be distinct (or isolated, ndr) to demonstrate its true form” – we can state that always an isolated building wants to demonstrate its true form or that the building aims to a “demonstrability” of compositional choices (clearness, generality, …). About this complex theme we can maybe say that the artefact isolation seems to still induce a reflection about formal absoluteness and a standing position about architectural exactness and finiteness. 

The changing in compositional techniques and in rarefied space’s conception happened at the middle of Twentieth Century (determining a passage form an auto-regulated place with an internal balance to a place with an articulated and osmotic order) was determined by the extension of project’s limits toward the territorial and geographical dimension. This fact is demonstrated, for example, by the crisis of modellistic approach that was typical for the autonomous and auto-concluded urban units elaborated during the first part of the Twentieth Century(we can refer to the stories of “urban sectors” by May and Schmidt). This constitutive mutation happened from 1946 when the debate about influences of contextual external elements started. The essay on espace indicible by Le Corbusier, recording this deep change of direction, prepares the theoretical premises for new urban paradigms: “the whole environment with its hills and profiles influences the place of architecture, testimony of human will, and imposes specific densities and depths” (LC 1946). The Chandigarh Esplanade is an emblematic application of a new ordering mode for rarefied space in adoption of geographical limits as measuring and proportioning elements of single monumental buildings. The declared aim is to convoke, in a new and inedited participation, landscape elements (natural and urban) for the construction of a modern urban space not as a paradigm but as a specific solution.

We want to reflect on this third point. In fact the new sensibility for places specificities and for “external conditions” (urban morphologies, natural emergencies, architectural exceptionalities) starts an inedited season, still operating, for urban dispositio. This sensibility finds an adequate expression in collocation because it is a  strongly relational and relative category – “collocatio ad situm pertinent” Alberti stated – and it is capable to assume an exalt an heteronomous composition with its centripetal devices transferring forms and significances from the context into the project site. A mode that reaches a stability in spatial configuration through clever ordering play of separations in highly selective process interpreting context’s specificity.

On the basis represented by this last premise, at this point, it seems interesting to highlight the contribution by Italian school. A contribution signed by some emblematic projects and rare occasions for realizing buildings. These occasions were not given by city and its voids but by specialized ambits (as university citadels, as demonstrated by the Chieti Campus by Barbieri, Del Bo, Manzo, Mennella well described by Carlos Martì Aris). In Italian cultural landscape we can individuate an ideal line connecting work on collocation conducted by different authors as Salvatore Bisongi, Antonio Monestiroli, Gianugo Polesello. Starting from the “city made up of parts” as notion, they defined and defended an urban composition based on the idea of separation and on the structuring role of the open space. A precise conception founded on the selection to be considered as “tool for the intervention on reality”. A common methodology of Laugier thinking of the Eighteenth Century and the reformist Alezander Cosenz (Tafuri 1967) and that – as we well know – is about the abstraction starting from orientations proposed by avant-garde movements and from developments of rationalist experience. Construction of discontinuous city, postulated by radical fringe of Modern Movement, has been assumed as a practicable solution for contemporary metropolis because selectivity and separations - using and modulating risks of a reduction figure/background - allow a management of big dimension and cleverly establish relationships between urban and geographical-territorial morphologies (this interest is the basis of work by Bisogni and Renna) (Bisogni/Renna 1965).   

Solutions proposed for available ambits in modern city – inclusion places in consolidated city or in-determined and rarefied spaces in extensive city - and that can be the object of extensive urban transformations are the zolle, the urban islands, the articulated architectural units. They represent reformulated ambits of “recognizable urban parts” according to an identity determined by a relational order and based on distances and isolations. As declared in essays associated to design proposals (Bisogni 2011, Monestiroli 1997, Polesello 1991), this line defines an alternative for the compact and concluded city assuming the block as elementary datum and it wants to contrast retrieve application by post-modernist representatives ( of which the recent project by Krier for Tor Bella Monaca is an emblem).

In Bisogni’s work, zolle define big collective places still manifesting an auto-regulating will of the compositional balance to be fixed through two or three separated artefacts, and they often chose, as application places, natural areas in urbanized territory. This fact reveals the deep preoccupation of Neapolitan master to construct the benchmarks of an hypothetical metropolitan city linked with “city in nature” by Hilberseimer (and of which Luigi Cosenza delineated the structural elements for a unitary territorial functioning). In this case, the relationship with territorial specific conditions essentially lays in localization choices for zolle, where, for example, “agriculture zolla” assumes the large Carditello agricultural park in which is included the Bourbon productive monument by Collecini.    

In Monestiroli’s elaboration, some proposals demonstrate the intention to define civil places of modern city through urban islands. They originate rarefied urban space in which buildings are separated by natural ground and in which each of them is defined from its own typological individuality. The richness of this reasoning is revealed which in proposal for Garibaldi-Repubblica site in Milan. Here Monestiroli matches the noticeable stylistic precision of buildings and the deep autonomy conferred by bases to the apparent freedom in positional choices and arrangements of each architecture. These choices are determined by the will of putting relevant urban orders, acting on the site’s borders, into the project site. In this sense we can explain the rotation of the big horizontal slab (financial building) that is referred to urban axis toward Brianza. 

The last, the Polesello’s contribution lays in his big urban compositions of Seventies and Eighties. In them we can find the “critical montage”, a compositional method based on disposition of typified figures generating a specific form of void. Describing sketch for Granary Island in Gdansk, the author underlines the reasons of collocations proposed. Positional and geometrical choices, more than the constitution of individual artefacts , reveal the intention to make the island a place resuming the entire city. So the project, strongly governed by a heteronomous principle, defines a system made of correspondences and contradictions with city’s formal values acting outside the island (architecturale mergences, urban plot, overcoming signs,…). Confirming or negating alignments-transfers, the critical nature of the project is represented by the arrangements and positions play. The general ordering principle regulates spatial relationships between transfers and internal presences (among them the island’s shape and its traces) determining a general system characterized by a great variety in which different figures co-exist.

This way, dispositio, regulating positions of separated architectures, becomes true in a clearly relative form without exactness ambitions. Formal datum of Gdnask island (as happens in Garibaldi-Repubblica site and for each zolla proposed by Bisogni) doesn’t only lay in its circumscribed morphology or in its primigenial shape – the limit lapped by river’s loop -, but it also derives from an overlapping, on the first shape, of a new shape constituted by a specific configuration defining the connective tissue between separations. No more a fragment with an univocal form, but a spatial order with changeable revelations showing the very actual richness of the dispositio.

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