Festival dell'architettura

Today The existing building is inadequate to contemporary needs and this raises to architecture the need to experiment with methods of intervention, implemented by new technologies but within its own universe of expressive tools and technical constructive. Teaching experience on a marginal neighborhood of the southern suburbs, taken as a typical example, is an opportunity to rework the model recurring basis - Maison Domino - as an open system.

In the contemporary debate about architecture, city is living a period of great interest and attention that absorbs a multitude of conflicting visions in which seems increasingly excluded the role of urban and architectural design as an opportunity of transformation and knowledge at the same time. The absence of a shared condition or quality of urban aesthetic generates fragmentary visions that often cause a spectacular architectural object, conceived as a giant sculpture which is individualistically opposed to the urban context.

It is the domain of the architectural form and of archistars. Archistars' projects are synonymous of fashion, design, logo, brand. Their reputation guarantees the success of the construction of museums, shops, pieces of city. Architecture as art has become entertainment, it is dematerialized to become "the allusion of a creative twist, the opportunity to acquire the atmosphere, the allure." (Franco Cecla, 2008)

This drift, more recently, has been increased by the digital dimension of the Smart city that is contributing to the loss of the city's physical body. There is no doubt that the new technologies applied to urban contexts are strategic resources that provide great opportunities (experience design, sensors and new materials, NGN, Cloud and Internet of Things), in which the smart idea is being enriched with new meanings, acquiring a social and environmental value.

However the transfer of the reality in cyberspace involves the loss of the value of tangible and real city towards immaterial projection, turning it into "a postcittà, a multi towards constantly changing in which the primary relations between time and space are completely subverted. [....] The postcittà is a smart city " (Purini, 2013).

Cyberspace upsets the classical coordinates of the geometry and it is built on the idea of connection and simultaneity, already anticipated by Archigram in the early 60's with their figurative visions. Instant city, Interchange City, Walking City and Plug-in city as ante litteram smart city are metaphors of cyberspace where the transports are interconnected and the infrastructure is able to build relations with the virtual space according to the electronic network, controlled by the plug-in that connects all the parts together.

Today the virtual dimension replaces the space experience with his image. It is revealed in an assembly of parts that, through the "zoom". It can capture rapidly from very close to the very far, from the detail until the satellite view. The virtual dimension builds an atopic and abstract space and without physical relationships with the territory. This atopic dimension of space is confirmed in the new settlements of the great urban containers, similar to objects of consumption without spatial relationship with the place. In this direction it inscribed the crisis of urban open space as a place of the meeting, increasingly moved in shopping malls and even more in the virtual space of social networks. They became the space of collective discussion as the agora of the Greek polis, in a global on-line connection, with the consequent compression of the time-space coordinates.

If the digital world produces new tools in the urban contexts, opening new relational maps, however, it fails to return the true nature of cities that is built by a metric and physical match, made of materials, sizes, distances, empty repetitions, fragments placed in simple or complex, ordered or disordered relations. There are two microcosms, real cities and the digital cities, which define a testing laboratory for the architectural and urban design which is called to respond to his genetic function of production of forms with meaning and relationships with places and the ability to "shape visible and significant to solving a problem" (Gregotti, 2000).

In light of these considerations it becomes essential to gain the condition of the contemporary city in its physical nature, and in particular on that part of the city that we call the suburbs, where the vast majority of the population lives.

This huge area is characterized by a building material inert and often shapeless, inadequate to meet the needs of contemporary life (family, work, lifestyle, education, leisure, etc.), which is rampant subtracting soil and posing questions on the level of immediate sustainability, de-growth, the rational use of resources, then good governance, categories increasingly incumbent on the meaning and ways of thinking about the architectural and urban design.

The existing building places the search, and then the design action, facing the urgent need to experiment new methods of intervention able to get out of an idea of "museification" of city centers and that of "tabula rasa", typical of the large east cities.

It poses a problem that can regenerate large parts of the city. On the one hand it corresponds to the need of use of existing resources, on the other pushes to meet the need for enhancement of the culture and identity of the city, such as the need to recognize the places, for long time subjected to degrading and inform actions. Cities aspire to be more livable, with an awareness of the contradictions and limits of a certain type of development and in the light of the problems that are evident across the planet: environmental pollution, quality of life, etc.

"Beyond the Limits to Growth" (Club of Rome, 1972) not only corresponds to the overcoming of modernity, but it is also a way to rethink the design action in the city and in the existing landscape that takes on a specific meaning in the realities of the South, and in the southern Italian reality where a "modernization without development" (Cassano, 2007) has created an immense periphery often hybrid, interrupted and incomplete.

This matter is now a body to change, to alter with the belief that the southern peripheral areas, not considered strategic within the globalized system to offer us a "third landscape" (Gilles Clément, 2005), a new territory in which to develop architectural biodiversity (Zardini, 2009) and to operate those design practices deleted from the marketing culture is prevalent today. Expands the operational scenario for the architecture, not only high-tech, bigness or shop architectures, not just museums, shopping malls and cultural centers, new symbols of communication and consumption, but the architecture of the reality, of the existing which is presented as an unbundled body, made up of fragments, pieces of broken, torn to pieces that requires new strategies and tools.

A challenging job of reworking and re-articulation within the city that includes the fragility of existing without destroying them through an act of critical writing that aims to identify new cycles of life, overcoming the myths of modernity and at the same time picking up what this product has to succeed to accomplish it fully trying to correct the distortions. The idea of building is changed, not the most modern metaphor of the machine, no more body to the classic way of Alberti and Vitruvius, not only immaterial body crossed by streams and currents of energy, rather living matter which reproduces itself. This perspective does not compare just inside of the attitudes of the building, but needs new as a result of a set of modes of composition which result in contamination (Pure Franco), understood as something of infection, a virus, a genetic risk needed for improvement. Architecture of the post (Bourriaud, 2004) in which the work is created on the basis of existing works, reworked.

The idea of not seek new forms but to reuse existing parts, contaminating them with research, technology and experimentation, is the background theme of the Design Laboratory of one of the most peripheral and abusive area of Reggio Calabria: San Sperato.

Here a housing unformed and incomplete had spread on agricultural soils, inadequate defining relations between the rural dimension and the demands of contemporary life, in a widespread lack of architectural and urban quality of primary infrastructure systems that configure a hybrid condition between cities and nature.

About this mix of parts and objects, which is the physical body of an existing imprecise and contaminated, has been conducted an exploration range that allowed you to select a sample of urban artifacts without formal qualities and consistency constructive, characterized by an incomplete structural frame, from that unfinished pillars with the irons naked metaphor of the incomplete, but also of "modernity".

Genetic principle and basic model more widespread use of this material is the Maison Domino, who was hired as an open system - Open Domino - on which to operate the project actions: edit, expand, prioritize, reconnections, insert, demolish, disperse, add, dig, tamper with, recognize limits and thresholds concrete, collide and / or introject pieces of reality. The objective of this work is to enable more dynamic open, not bent at stereotypes and fashions homogenizing, to rewrite and repaginate this urban text, in which the system of the smart city can only support but do not replace the tools disciplinary architecture in these contexts call to action on urgent adjustment seismic safety, functional redesign of the interior, landscape restoration, use of technology for energy efficiency and use of alternative energy sources and use of brownfield sites and marginal. The purpose of this work is the reactivation of the urban conditions and collective settlement insufficient or completely missing in reality and in particular in southern Calabria, which today is The Third Island.

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