Il numero 26 di U+D – curato da Joerg Gleiter – è il primo di una serie dedicata allo studio della forma urbana nelle diverse aree culturali europee. Lo scopo di questo progetto è fornire un quadro originale del processo formativo dell’idea di città in condizioni storiche e politiche differenti, attraverso l’esame delle relative ricerche teoriche e progettuali, con le quali dibattere su tendenze e scuole, consapevoli della complessità che questo genere di argomentazioni richiede. L’obiettivo è quello di mostrare come l’eredità di questi percorsi del progetto possa essere foriera di una profonda riflessione critica sull’attuale deriva verso processi di spettacolarizzazione dell’architettura contemporanea.
Matter is the physical and perceptible part of the world knowable through experience, the substance from which the
bodies of the universe are composed.
The term expresses both indeterminacy and the ability to receive form. Therefore, not being the building material, matter
is the given of the problem, preexisting any transformation.
It is the primary origin of the built reality.
It is no coincidence that the Latins used materia rerum to mean the origin of things. The term, moreover, etymologically
derives from mater : matter as the mother of all construction. But in Latin, mater also indicates the stump of a tree,
providing a suggestive image of the sequence of transformations through which the architect is called to operate: the
stump is the origin of the plant structure that necessarily binds branches, roots, and leaves. The difference between
matter and material concerns, even before the concrete construction, human consciousness. Recognizing within nature
the disposition of certain materials to be transformed into materials is part of the history of human consciousness
(spontaneous or critical) in relation to the Universe.
LECTUR 7/2. THE FORMATION OF MODERN SPECIAL NODAL BUILDINGS
(May 2026)
Some aspects of the transformation of urban fabric into a building were observed, during the base building lessons, through the continuity of the process generating the current row house from the melting of terraced units, that is, through the transformation of a portion of an urban aggregate into a building. We will now touch on the complex formative continuity of many modern specialized buildings, which often reveal within themselves the explanation of their own formative laws by “knotting” (transforming into spatial nodes) places that were originally physically or virtually open. Like many buildings of the past, they arise from the dialectic between enclosure and roof, between serial and organic structures, between city and building. The derivation of modern theater from urban fabric is, for example, among the most evident and documented phenomena of this process. Theatrical performance itself evolves through the specialization of “basic” forms of entertainment (religious recitations, secular festivals, carousels). Johan de Witt’s famous 1596 drawing of the Swan Theatre in London fully demonstrates the nature of the building in formation: the “public” space is the fluid, open stalls-like space where spectators stand or sit in makeshift seats; the “private” space is the perimeter of the fabric boxes, codified by the construction laws of the enclosure. While Plautus and Seneca were already being performed in the 15th-century courtyard of Cardinal Riario’s palace, the transformation of the Elizabethan theatre concluded in the early 17th century and the contemporary one began with the permanent roofing of the open space of the old Fortune Theatre. A similar formative process can be discerned, still underway, in many aspects of 19th-century architectural design. In the large stock exchanges, for example, which arose at the end of the 16th century as enclosed squares within a series of offices and warehouses, whose shelter generated the covered space for exchange (Berlage’s “basilica” for the Amsterdam Stock Exchange represents only the best-known outcome of this process). Or in the large department stores that emerged in Paris following the very new tradition of the passages, where elements, structures, and serial systems are interwoven around the space of a covered courtyard. But, above all, it can be identified in the dialectic between urban spaces and interior spaces within buildings generated, at the end of the last century, by the organization of complex communications networks in metropolises. The articulation of the post and telegraph building, in fact, arose from the connection of serial spaces, for administration and services, around the large hall for the public, a vast space mediating between city and building. The late-nineteenth-century architect, bewildered by the interweaving of unfamiliar problems, took refuge in the wealth of experience brought ashore by history, in traditional building types still capable of fostering syncretism, transformation, and modernization. Many of the major nineteenth-century post offices are organized around the notion of enclosure, like those in Germany, which were organized around a vast, open hof (in Breslau, Halle, or Potsdam), but also protected by glass, as in Berlin. The transition from courtyard to central space is most evident in the reuse of existing buildings organized along internal paths that wind around open spaces (convents, palaces, etc.). This is not simply a matter of reuse, but a process where the transformation of open space generates entirely new, more organic buildings. Consider the transformation of the Fondego dei Tedeschi in Venice into a post office, where the introduction, in this 16th-century serial building, of a large iron and glass structure covering the open courtyard triggered a unified transformation process involving all the building’s components: the stresses induced by the roof, having compromised the stability of the underlying walls, progressively (organically) extended to the entire building, aided by subsequent consolidation works. The entire structure emerged transformed: the new central space, as in any nodal building, was statically supported, distributively served, and spatially dominant, while the peripheral spaces were load-bearing, serving, and serial. In the processual transformation of the large central space, the “logical” next phase was the merging of the atrium and the counter room, that is, the progressive fusion of the core of the structure with the urban space. Born from the city, the spatial node returns to the life of the streets: if still at the beginning of the 20th century the same manuals recommend to consider the room for the counters as a “spacious courtyard completely covered with glass” (Donghi), ……………………….
The base building experience teaches us how a building organism composed of multiple cells tends over time to specialize its parts in a cyclical process that involves the progressive, organic integration of each element within the unifying framework of a structure.
Similarly, considering the aggregative organism as the result of necessary relationships between identified building types, the buildings themselves tend toward the progressive assumption of specific specialized roles, integrated within the broader context of the urban organism.
These roles have to be interpreted through a formative process consisting of successive diachronic transformations of spaces, construction structures, and even functions, synthetically and unifiedly readable as characters of specialized buildings .
The term specializedbuilding will therefore include all the non-residential parts of the urban fabric, including those building types in which the housing function is secondary to that which gives rise to the specialization of the type. The palace (think of the 16th-century Florentine and Roman ones, for example) is an organism dedicated only secondarily to residential purposes: it is organized primarily to serve the building’s representative goal and its symbolic character. Consequently, even the overall expression of the organism only secondarily considers the values attributable to residence. ………
