6. lect. special serial building
SPECIAL SERIAL BUILDING (May 2026)
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 specialized building 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. ………
