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CyNUM’s 2nd Regional Urban Morphology Conference

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Conference Brief
CyNUM’s 2nd Regional Urban Morphology Conference aims to establish a common platform to discuss further how cities, in the
context of the south-eastern Mediterranean, transform over time by concentrating on their urban morphological characteristics.
The conference sets up an academic and professional arena in which urban morphology would be explored through heritage
conservation-based urban transformation, regeneration-based urban transformation, and (re)development-based urban
transformation within the rich urban context of south-eastern Mediterranean cities. The sub-themes of the conference are as follows:
• Transformation of Urban Form
• Architecture, Heritage and Urban Form
• Conservation of Urban Landscape
• Public Space Network

Organising Committee (Alphabetic Order)
Gizem Caner, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture, Cyprus International University
Alessandro Camiz, Associate Prof., Department of Architecture, Ozyegin University
Nevter Zafer Cömert, Associate Professor, Department of Architecture, Eastern Mediterranean University.
Ilaria Geddes, Researcher, Department of Architecture, University of Cyprus
Şebnem Önal Hoşkara, Professor, Department of Architecture, Eastern Mediterranean University (Conference Chair)
Nezire Ozgece, Department of Architecture, Faculty of Fine Arts, Design and Architecture, Cyprus International University

Scientific Committee (Alphabetic Order)
Ali Alraouf, HBKU University, Doha, Qatar
Cana Bilsel, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Olgu Çalışkan, Middle East Technical University, Turkey
Naciye Doratlı, Eastern Mediterranean University, Cyprus
Sergio Garcia Perez, University of Zaragoza
Payam Mahasti, Cyprus International University, Cyprus
Marco Maretto, University of Parma & Sapienza University of Rome, Italy
Ayşe Sema Kubat, Istanbul Technical University, Turkey.
Giuseppe Strappa, Sapienza University of Rome, Italy.
Tolga Ünlü, Çukurova University, Turkay
Malgorzata Hanzl, Lodz University of Technology, Poland

 

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THE UTILITY OF URBAN MORPHOLOGY STUDIES AND THE RENEWAL OF OUR JOURNAL

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THE UTILITY OF URBAN MORPHOLOGY STUDIES AND THE RENEWAL OF OUR JOURNAL

U+D  issue 15   EDITORIAL

by Giuseppe Strappa

In the life of every journal, I suppose, there are moments of reflection and regeneration: one takes a look at the work done and takes stock, looking at the future with new eyes, and makes plans. The U+D new issue is one of these moments for us. It is the result of a considerable commitment by the entire editorial staff, and we present it, I must admit, with some expectations. It poses, in fact, two relevant goals.

The first is to try to review the current situation of research in Italy concerning urban morphology, particularly in architecture schools. Courses in this discipline are now active in the faculties of many countries, which share the need for rationality, concreteness, transmissibility of the proposed methods. In Italy, the signs seem contradictory. In Rome, for example, despite the presence of an important tradition that stems from the teaching of Saverio Muratori, the urban morphology course has become optional. In other faculties such as in Bari, Bologna, Ferrara, Florence, Milan, Naples, Palermo, Parma, Turin, Venice, these courses, even if given with a limited number of credits, are highly active and open to new perspectives. The term “urban morphology” is employed in an extended and open meaning, as a study of the form of the built landscape based on different founding principles, which share, however, their role as a rational and communicable tool aimed at the project. For this reason, I believe that urban morphology could also prefigure a choice of fields (sometimes not easy) with respect to current production, often based on methods aimed more at communication and individual expression than at construction. Against this egocentric inclination of the architect, in the past schools have in some way constituted a remedy, playing an important aggregation and sharing role. Yet, I wonder if it is still possible today to speak, in the proper sense, of schools. They presuppose masters and require, together with common theories and methods, shared values. The master is such not only for the quality of his scientific production, but above all for his ability to express common goals, the competence to recognize a common substratum in the work of individuals. Just as the school is an organism, a unit of parts held together by a unifying objective. Two conditions that are impossible today: we have long lost the unity of things, the vision, or at least the hope, of an organic world where every knowledge finds its place, every cultural heritage its congruent location.

Nonetheless, there is no doubt that specificities and shared lines still exist, albeit indirectly. I believe that the contributions of this issue, at least in part, are proof of this. Moreover, the study of urban form, in order for it to be a field in which differences have a rational and legible basis, is the terrain that best allows us to distinguish areas of research and affinities, and also oppositions, which originate even further back than the lesson of the masters. The specificities of the Milanese research have more distant roots than the writings of Aldo Rossi and Guido Canella, they have their distant origins in the Lombard Enlightenment; the experiments in the Roman area go beyond the lesson of Gianfranco Caniggia and Saverio Muratori, they go back to the studies of Gustavo Giovannoni, Giovan Battista Milani and many others. But these specificities are now unstable, recognized in an uncertain and controversial way. It is no coincidence that today there is no disciple who is willing to defend that legacy openly, who does not feel obliged to claim his secularism, his independence. It is true that identity, in the contemporary condition, is not inherited: it is a strenuous search in which the vigorous defense of the origins can be a risky bond. The contemporary condition of those who investigate the urban form is that of a disorientation: orphans of the masters, whose lessons we jealously guard, we understand how certainties no longer exist, how it is impossible to reconstruct the lost unity of things.

Yet, perhaps there is, more than we are willing to admit, a long-lasting cultural layer that gives a sense of continuity to our research. I believe that, to understand how the Italian response to the new demands of objectivity and realism shows its own characters, it is necessary to compare it to the “quantitative” drift of the studies often conducted abroad, influenced by the success, even professional, of the Space Syntax. Certainly, useful studies which throw new light on the structures that regulate the shape of cities, but still giving an indirect contribution to the urban project. On the other hand, I believe that many of these studies, based on the notions of density, flows, networks, are in my opinion an update of the issues addressed by the traditional urban planning discipline. This diversity perhaps explains, if it does not justify, the improper term, used above all abroad, of the “Italian School”, because it is true that the research on the form of the city is characterized with us by a humanistic and historical background that has always prevented determinisms and taxonomies, allowing us to recognize how a building or a fabric exists, in its fullness, only in a more general context, in a becoming that, together, explains them and gives them meaning. Although the invitations to the participants to the study day did not cover the broad spectrum of research that derives from the multiple meanings of the term “urban morphology”, I consider the almost total absence, in the following contributions, of the strictly “quantitative” field of study to be significant. A remarkable specificity which allows us to look with optimism at the original role that studies conducted in our country can play on the international scene. In my opinion, the evidence of this condition poses with increasing evidence, after the long late-romantic season of individualisms and spectacular gestures, the problem of a radical renewal of research in architecture that could give our work a new civil sense.  Beyond the slogans, the real tools of sustainability and regeneration of our cities (which will not die of Covid, with all due respect to our prophets of the return to the villages) consist, I am convinced, precisely in the careful study of the built reality and its form, its continuity and its ruptures, which provides awareness of the crisis we are going through and can show us the way to future transformations.

The second important goal of this issue is to experiment new forms of construction and a different way of collaborating with the authors, having in mind the place of our journal in the international panorama of studies that are being conducted today on urban form. Perhaps it is useful, in order to understand the urgency of this issue, to summarize the cultural framework in which our work arises.

The magazine was born in 2014 as an Italian contribution to the International Seminar on Urban Form (Isuf), a scientific society that already owned its own, relevant journal dedicated to urban morphology. However, it was interested in it, above all from the point of view of geography, in the wake of the research of M.R.G.Conzen. His fertile teachings, heirs of the Kulturlandschaft, were developed in the 70s by the Urban Morphology Research Group (UMRG), with which we found, at the beginning of the 90s, considerable affinities and promising prospects for collaboration, starting from the very definition of “urban structure” realistically understood, basically in architectural terms, as an integrated system of routes, lots and buildings. But also, some significant differences. Geography is above all a descriptive science, when the goal of urban morphology, from our point of view as architects, is above all aimed at the project. The problem of geography is to make the infinite irregularity of a mountain ridge coincide with the simplicity of the line drawn on a map. It is the difficulty of any descriptive science that seeks synthesis in the general and abstract representation of the concrete details of the object it describes. The problem of architecture is different: recognizing in that ridge a beginning, a first provisionally inhabited form and the origin of the paths that structure a territory. Saverio Muratori had devoted a lot of energy to formulating a “theory of ridges” based on the shape of the soil and its anthropization process. A formulation conducted with the designer’s tools. Was it, too, a science? Certainly yes, if by the term we mean a form of systematic knowledge. But it was also a critical form of investigation, a reading oriented by the operating subject that proceeds by layers and phases, recognizes in the object the aptitude for transformation and, fundamental fact, the expression of a civil context. Reading is therefore already a project, it is an evaluation and a choice. For this reason, it cannot aspire to the (moreover relative) objectivity of the descriptive sciences, as well as the design that follows is the full responsibility of the designer, with the inevitable discontinuities due to an evident condition of crisis.

However, the Conzenian school had inherited a particular meaning of geography, that of the cultural landscape, of the territory as a synthesis in the making of successive transformations. A meaning that we felt close to. This is the definition of urban morphology that Jeremy Whitehand, the best-known exponent of the Conzenian school gives: ‘Urban morphology is the study of the built form of cities, and it seeks to explain the layout and spatial composition of urban structures and open spaces, their material character and symbolic meaning, in light of the forces that have created, expanded, diversified, and transformed them ‘. A broad and open meaning, in many ways similar to ours. On the wave of this affinity, Isuf was born, which over time had to reach its current dimensions of international association, transforming itself into a large container in which many souls live together. The Italian journal, therefore, was born as a complementary communication tool devoted to the reading and to the architectural design. Within this context, our initial aspiration was to consider the journal itself as a project, an architecture in some way, made up of congruent parts linked by a relationship of necessity. The ideal reference could only be the post-war publishing tradition, the season in which architecture magazines reported the great debates that then revolved around the revision of the international modernity. We soon realized, however, how that production was the result of a cultural climate in which different and cohesive communities of experimenters converged, who grouped around common convictions, making clear the positions taken, clear debates and controversies. A quite different climate from the current one, fragmented in many separate research, rarely communicating with each other. Moreover, within a more general condition in which the common meaning of the term “form” considers the rational and concrete aspect of our profession to be of little relevance. A context in which the term “type” smacks of archaeology and those of “construction” and “fabric” of obsolete techniques, despite the fact that their unifying meaning, and their civil value are in direct relationship with the emerging issues of the current city.

Every author ends up today by producing autonomous contributions to the journals, linked to the others only by a common theme. For this reason, we have tried to involve some designers and scholars interested in the problem of the concrete study of urban form already in the planning of this and the next issue. At the same time being aware, however, of the inevitable partiality of the operation. While we were not deluding ourselves that the structure of the issue could be born from this day of study (task and responsibility of the editorial staff), we believed that this meeting could however compare themes, ideas, points of view in such a way that each author could take into account the context in which his article ranks. It seems to me that the result confirms, with all the limits of an experiment, the effectiveness of the method. This issue, in fact, does not constitute a form of proceedings of the study day, but the collection of contributions by it oriented, often quite different from those presented during the meeting.

The articles derived from the study day are partly published in this and partly will be published in the next issue of the journal. The following issue, just because of the questions that have arisen on the concrete usefulness of morphology studies, will be dedicated to the urban project.

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FRANCO PURINI – DESIGNING A MANIFESTO

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DESIGNING A MANIFESTO

by FRANCO PURINI – in Paesaggio Urbano n.1, 2014

Team leader: Giuseppe Strappa
Project team:  Alessandro Camiz, Paolo Carlotti, Giancarlo Galassi, Martina Longo. 

COMPETITION FOR THE REDEVELOPMENT OF AN AREA IN THE HISTORIC CENTRE OF CAREZZANO MAGGIORE FOR SOCIAL AND CIVIC USES – first prize

click here              Purini su Carezzano  

An extensive debate about the city, based on different
and sometimes radically divergent models, in recent
years attempted to verify, using interpretative models
developed by the twentieth century architectural culture,
what was going on in cities.
Among these, three models can be distinguished because
of their complexity, clarity and interest.
With regard to Italy, the first of these models follows a
study tradition dating back to Gustavo Giovannoni,
Saverio Muratori, Gianfranco Caniggia, Giancarlo Cataldi
and Pier Luigi Maffei. This one is the most influential
and enduring theoretical and operational model on urban
studies produced in Italy, and it considers the city as
an organism with a layered structure.
The second model interprets the city as a system of
dynamic relationships, as a communicative flow
of networks. The city is considered here more than a
physical fact, a pure projection of information and events,
a chaotic and metamorphic simulacrum, a collage
suspended between the city of Colin Rowe and Fred Koetter
and the generic city of Rem Koolhaas. What appears to be
essential to this point of view is the immateriality of the city.
The landscape is the keyword to the third model. Assuming
the landscape paradigm, the city lost not only its physical
identity but also the immaterial one: a neo-naturalistic vision,
blurring the microcosm into the macrocosm, took the place
of identity.
Giuseppe Strappa is one of the most prominent members of
the structuralist line, attentive and creative interpreter of the
Caniggian lesson (continued with remarkable originality);
he has succeeded in creating an actual School, based on
the notion of architectural and urban organism, within
the Faculty of Architecture in Rome. His conception
of architecture is based on the relationship between
unity and parts, plasticity and elasticity, uniqueness
and seriality, design and construction, and between
many other dialectical dyads. The project proceeds
not only in an analytical way, but also following
indirect and unpredictable paths where memory and
emotion make the invisible visible. His theoretical and
architectural work is anyway open to a constant critical
review, comparing his beliefs with what emerged from
disciplinary alternatives.
One of the last works of Giuseppe Strappa, the
redevelopment of an area of the historical center
of Carezzano Maggiore in Piemonte, is a kind of
exemplar manifesto where the coincidence between
an admirable theoretical accuracy and a recognizable
architectural writing maturity produced a more
than significant result. This project, first prize winner of a
competition, was elaborated by a design group directed
by Giuseppe Strappa, with Alessandro Camiz, Paolo
Carlotti, Giancarlo Galassi, Martina Longo, and by the
collaborators Marco Maretto, Nicolò Boggio, Pina Ciotoli.
It is the outcome of three intentions: the accurate
reconstruction of the formation phases of Carezzano
Maggiore, the contribution of that part to a new identity, the
definition of a spatial warping which, through a careful and
inspired decodification of the metrics of the urban tissues,
reorganizes the existing settlement enrolling it into a
new set of urban relationships.
The buildings were recasted into a new facility enclosing a
new civic center, following the palazzo type evolution. For the
variety of content and the way in which it is composed into a
coherent system, the project gives a convincing answer to
the new paradigm of urban regeneration.
The project of Giuseppe Strappa is the result of listening
to the formation phases of the city and to the urban
imagination. An imagination which, by incorporating the
built memory, resulted in a complete and definitive form,
always rational, but, in its very nature, unspeakable. There a
also emerges from the project a sense of duration and at the
same time the representation of how, conversely, the
circumstances that produced it must be transcended to be
seen as something suprahistorical.
Finally, this work shows how the structuralist line on the
interpretation of the city is able to promote innovative
responses to more complex urban problems. It points out
that the city can not help but design ideas that move from
its collective identity.

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Attualita’ della proposta di M.R.G. Conzen

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Attualita’ della proposta di M.R.G. Conzen

Giancarlo Cataldi, Gian Luigi Maffei,  Marco Maretto, Nicola Marzot, Giuseppe Strappa

Presentazione del libro L’analisi della forma urbana (Franco Angeli, Milano, 2012) edizione italiana del libro di M.R.G. Conzen, Alnwick, Nurthumberland. A study in Town Plan Analysis Institute of British Geographers, London 1960

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L’edizione italiana dello studio su Alnwyck riveste, a nostro avviso, un significato che va oltre la documentazione dell’analisi esemplare di una piccola città inglese ai confini con la Scozia, per acquistare un senso più generale.

Con la fondazione dell’Isuf (International Seminar on Urban Form), nel 1994, gli studiosi italiani di morfologia urbana hanno scoperto il patrimonio di conoscenze della scuola geografica inglese che fa capo a M.R.G. Conzen, illustre geografo di origine tedesca autore dello studio che qui presentiamo, e dei suoi continuatori, J.W.R.Whitehand, T.R. Slater, P. Larkham, K.Kropf, oltre al figlio Michael Conzen.

Non solo ne veniva riconosciuta l’affinità con molte delle proposte sviluppate dalla scuola italiana, sulla scia dell’insegnamento di Saverio Muratori, ma, soprattutto, se ne costatava la reciproca complementarità ponendo finalmente le basi concrete, dopo tanto parlare di rapporti interdisciplinari, di un lavoro comune attraverso il quale geografi e architetti potessero condividere, all’interno di uno stesso terreno di studi, metodi di ricerca e, ci si consenta il termine, “vocazioni” comuni. Perché, questo è il punto, il lavoro di M.R.G. Conzen dimostra una spiccata propensione a interpretare la città e il territorio come sintesi vitale di un flusso di esperienze storicamente individuate. M.R.G. Conzen ha compreso in modo operante, in altre parole, quello che per noi costituisce la sostanza stessa dell’architettura: che ogni forma (del territorio, della città, degli edifici) è il risultato di un processo, della progressiva associazione organica di parti, e che ha senso scomporla e indagarne le componenti solo se si tiene conto della sua sostanziale unità e indivisibilità. Possedeva, dunque, una nozione di organismo urbano e territoriale che, mai espressa attraverso esplicite definizioni, ha operato come un sostrato profondo nel dare coerenza “architettonica” alla struttura teorica della propria indagine.

Questo dato costituisce uno dei grandi motivi d’interesse dello studio su Alnwick, ma anche, riteniamo, la ragione dell’attualità della proposta di M.R.G. Conzen: lo sforzo di comprendere la forma delle cose non per quello che sono, ma nel loro divenire storico permette, infatti, di leggere anche le condizioni di lacerazione della forma del territorio contemporaneo come stato di transizione, momento provvisorio di una trasformazione continua il cui carattere è, in questo, non troppo diverso da quello città medievale in perenne cambiamento, ed è informe solo per chi non sappia leggerne la latente aspirazione alla composizione e all’unità. E’ proprio questa aspirazione a riunire il molteplice, più che l’unità in se, a dare forma alle cose e senso al progetto.

In questo senso la lettura di Alnwick è l’individuazione di una teoria: la storia perfetta di un piccolo borgo narrata nelle sue fasi formative fino alla condizione contemporanea. Fasi ricondotte a provvisorie unità da un singolare “epos geografico” che individua, rende cioè unici e irripetibili, comportamenti generali che la lettura riconosce come patrimonio comune di molti altri insediamenti e territori dove la forma del suolo e il lavoro dell’uomo stabiliscono una solidarietà riconoscibile come “tipica”.

E’ di natura architettonica, inoltre, una delle principali innovazioni nella lettura del territorio introdotte da M.R.G. Conzen, quella di fringe belt, che ha a che fare direttamente non solo con la documentazione che il cartografo riporta attraverso convenzioni, ma con la lettura critica, che coincide con il progetto delle trasformazioni.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Si tratta di una nozione complessa, cui è impossibile associare un termine italiano, tant’è che nella traduzione abbiamo dovuto impiegare una perifrasi ma capace di fertili traslazioni dall’ambito strettamente geografico a quello progettuale, contribuendo a cogliere, oggi, alcuni caratteri fondanti dell’instabile metropoli contemporanea. In realtà le idee affini di “perimetro” e “confine” sono state da qualche tempo alla base della lettura di qualsiasi forma del costruito, in particolare nel campo degli studi urbani condotti da architetti, mettendo in luce, tra l’altro, la storica contrapposizione tra città e campagna e il suo disgregarsi nel magma dello Spratly urbano. Eppure esse sono capaci di cogliere solo uno degli infiniti stati di transizione, semplificando le letture ma anche riducendone il significato. Propongono, in altre parole, uno sviluppo discreto di un processo in realtà continuo e che procede, nondimeno, per fasi di accelerato sviluppo seguite da altre di rilevante stasi. La nozione di fringe belt coglie invece le trasformazioni intermittenti del perimetro nel loro fluire: non solo come confine, ma come premessa di una nuova struttura dapprima fluttuante e incerta (liquida, si direbbe oggi) che si consolida, viene demarcata e diventa più stabile nel tempo. Compresa a fondo, l’innovazione terminologica e metodologica conzeniana permette di interpretare la frammentazione delle periferie urbane non semplicemente come caotiche, e per questo indecifrabili, lacerazioni, ma nel loro significato autentico di strutture in formazione, delle quali vanno riconosciuti caratteri evidenti e potenziali.

Questa innovazione, rivolta alla realtà dei fenomeni in atto, sembra oggi tanto più attuale, quanto più le analisi urbane si vanno distaccando dallo sviluppo dei fenomeni concreti.

E’ in questo senso che l’edizione italiana dello studio su Alnwick ha il significato, come si diceva, di una proposta alternativa: individua un fronte comune contro la deriva astraente di molte delle riflessioni contemporanee sull’architettura alle diverse scale del territorio, della città, degli edifici. Ci confrontiamo oggi, infatti, con una crisi dai caratteri ignoti nelle grandi fasi di transizione del passato, dove la lettura indiretta e mediatica del mondo costruito va sostituendo la conoscenza diretta della realtà, svincolando la forma progettata dalle relazioni organiche che dovrebbero tenerla unita agli altri aspetti dell’uso del territorio. Smarrendo, in fondo, le basi che permettono di leggerne la reale complessità e di cogliere l’istanza a quel vicendevole rapporto di necessità tra le parti che il grande flusso delle modificazioni del paesaggio costruito, forse più che nel passato, oggi ci pone.  Senza la nozione di organismo urbano, senza la forma data da un confine pur mutevole e strutturante, la lettura di una condizione in rapida trasformazione, gli spazi dei margini irrisolti della città contemporanea acquistano il significato, suggestivo quanto inutilizzabile, di grandi schegge in conflitto tra loro. Lo spazio delle nostre periferie finisce così col ricadere nel grande mare del pittoresco metropolitano, dei territori “ibridi e vaghi”: la città reale come combinazione fortuita, uno dei tanti casi del possibile.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Si vedano, per convincersene, le interpretazioni della città contemporanea (da Virilio a Koolhaas) che hanno conquistato intere generazioni di architetti, dove la metropoli diviene un luogo della mente che racchiude personali rappresentazioni delle trasformazioni in corso, livelli sovrapposti di “architetture eventuali”, layers di realtà possibili e discontinue, secondo una cultura disciplinare che organizza, di fatto, il consenso alla crescita della metropoli contemporanea per addizioni ininterrotte e seriali.  E’ evidente, se solo si alza lo sguardo al di sopra delle contingenze, come la funzione dell’architettura sia ancora quella dell’arte borghese, ancora quella tafuriana di “allontanare l’angoscia introiettandone le cause” che racchiude, anche, l’ambizione di progettare la casualità del molteplice letto nei suoi frammenti separati: l’evocazione della complessità contro la sua soluzione. Scomparsa la pertinenza con la propria fase storica e con la propria area culturale (tolte dal loro tumultuoso contesto economico e antropico) le forme si trasformano in oggetti di evocazione. Una tecnica di seduzione, dove le contraddizioni sembrano di volta in volta, illusoriamente e paradossalmente, sciogliersi nell’eccesso dello spettacolo.

Non è, dunque, un caso che lo studio su Alnwick, e la proposta di metodo che contiene, siano proposti al lettore italiano proprio oggi, quando la produzione neoromantica dello star system internazionale pone quesiti sul ruolo stesso dell’architetto, sulla sua funzione anestetizzante di mediazione culturale e politica.

Comprendere il testo di M.R.G. Conzen significa scoprire (o confermare) una via d’uscita: leggere il territorio e la città contemporanei non come semplice, apparentemente neutrale constatazione di come essi ci appaiono, ma come processo operante e conflittuale, che permette di interpretare, scegliere, disegnare in continuità col grande flusso di trasformazione del costruito e della sua storia.