Category Archives: LEZIONI

SPECIAL BUILDING LEARNED LANGUAGE

5. SPECIAL BUILDING LEARNED LANGUAGE

Giuseppe Strappa

5c – The genesis of the Roman palace, one of the most fruitful events in the entire history of European architecture, indicates a different path to the formation of modern architectural organisms. A phenomenon that can be read clearly in its manifestation as the becoming of the manifold to form unity. As for the Venetian palace, the process that is at the origin of its particular character is not due to the contribution of a small group of architects, but constitutes the collective, living result of the transformations operating in the fabric. It comes to light from successive mutations of the housing aggregates of medieval origin and from the permanence of that ancient substratum which, in Rome, has always constituted an inexhaustible source of renewal.

Its formation process began with the recast, in the 14th-16th century, of simple single-family dwellings to satisfy the need of building new large-scale residences for the emerging political and economical classes.

In the context of an already densely built city, the only one possibility was the progressive acquisition of fabric units, linking them together through a common private, inner path.

Thus, around the central space of the courtyard that brings together the original pertinent areas, a sort of “reversed” fabric is formed, a small introverted city that takes its characters from the external city. The transition from aggregate to building is expressed by unifying the external facades into a single wall merging the single buildings in a common rhythm of openings. The process also establishes a hierarchy between the different parts: ………………..

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NOTES ON BASE BUILDING

"PROFFERLO HOUSE" IN ROME

NOTES ON BASE BUILDING

G.Strappa

The most successful examples of a congruent and proportionate overlap of the modern city with the ancient one is in large part due to the “recasting process” of the existing urban fabric. The act of recasting is not the simple union of elements, it is a plastic modification, a collaboration that implies a structural mutation: the merging and gathering of the individual units into a single whole, into a new unity of a higher degree. The Renaissance palace is, when it derives directly from the fabric, a critical recasting, made with the decisive contribution of the architect who operates the aesthetic synthesis at the end of a “necessary” process. To fully understand its meaning it is essential to mention, at least, the matter of this recast, which, in many areas and especially in Italy, consists of single-family houses.  A particularly significant example, from this point of view, is the form of the dwelling house in the Roman area, whose roots date back to the types used from the XI century, in an environment that, due to the low population density, could be considered in large part semi-rural (26).

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THE AGGREGATION PROCESS AND THE FORM OF THE FABRIC

Course in Urban Morphology (2019/20)

THE AGGREGATION PROCESS AND THE FORM OF THE FABRIC

G. Strappa

 

The form of the Italian city produced in the Middle Age, often derived from the consumption of decayed ancient  urban organisms, expresses the solidarity between housing units that join together to form higher-level organisms.

This organic character, which binds in one unit different components (the route, the building, the pertinent area) in a “society of houses” is certainly the shared heritage of a building and urban custom that was born in the Roman world and is, in turn, linked to a cultural koinè that belongs to the Mediterranean masonry -plastic world. Tacitus had clearly focused on this subject by noting, by difference, the “serial” character of Germanic settlements: “Vicos locant non in nostrum morem conexis et coherentibus aedificiis: suam quisque domum spatio circumdat, sive adversus casus ignis remedium sive inscitia aedificandi” (1). The type of housing at the origin of most of the formative processes of the Italian cities developed starting from the XIII-XIV century is above all the row-house, declined in different local variants in the whole peninsula, from the Venetian types that translate into masonry building organisms originated from wooden courtyard  matrices, to the markedly plastic examples of central and southern Italy.

This type of dwelling, which communicates through its own forms the predisposition of the single building to collaboration and aggregation, is remarkably constant, It is identifiable in its transformations process, within the different cultural areas, both in the bicellular type (to which reference will mostly be made), and in the monocellular one derived from the consumption of the courtyard house (pseudo row-house)…….

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EXERCISE ON URBAN FABRIC IN VIA LATA – URBAN MORPHOLOGY COURSE -2019/20

EXERCISE ON URBAN FABRIC IN VIA LATA

October 2019

PHASES

1 – ROUTES HIERARCHIZATION
2- FABRIC FORMATION ON MATRIX ROUTES
3- FABRIC FORMATION ON BUILDING ROUTES
4- FABRIC FORMATION ON CONNECTION ROUTES
5- MULTIFAMILY HOUSE FORMATION PROCESS
6- SPECIALIZATION PROCESS
7- KNOTTING PROCESS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TERRITORY AS ARCHITECTURE

TERRITORY AS ARCHITECTURE

Giuseppe Strappa

 

 

 

 

Early formation of Pienza (from Cataldi)

 

Territory is materia signata, a substance which man’s consciousness acknowledges as having an aptitude for transformation: architectural material in the most complete sense of the word.[1]

Therefore, use of the natural matter, of the soil bed in its different, complementary meanings related to vegetal or geological world, lies at the origin of the formation of the territory. So, its study is linked to the architectural interpretation of a process, to the problem of how matter becomes material before being transformed into a territorial element and how each element arising from this transformation contributes to the formation of a more general “territorial organism” comprising increasingly higher-level structures.

Land-scape means in English “modelling of the earth”, with an  emphasis on the natural aspect of the cognitive environment the term is associated with. It is opposed to the italian term “paesaggio” (French paesage , Spanish paisaje) associated with the term “paese” and hence to the Latin pagus meaning village, acknowledging, in a concise manner, a relationship of solidarity between the land and human settlement.

Therefore, the landscape as a cultural expression is linked to the inhabited space, to the cooperation between natural and artificial resources, to the transformations that interpret the form of orographic peaks, valleys, plains and their ability to become a built environment. In short, it is the territory’s visible aspect, the concise expression of its structure. ………………………

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