Rewriting the edges of the path as contemporary public urban space.
di Alessandra Giannini
1. Landscapes in motion: new perspectives for the public space
2. Archetypes: grid, maze and line
3. Operations planning: Strategies
4. Stratify: hide / reveal.
5. Integrate: osmosis / contrast.
6. Hybrid: disperse / incorporate
Landscapes in motion: new perspectives for the public space
Today infrastructures are at the core of the european and international debate, a strategic element of contemporary settlements, of expansion in the generic city they can become the mean of finding a new “urbanity”.
Mobility can be declined in a sense that connotes a condition of contemporary society, it belongs to our age and produces its own grounds and architecture with distinctive forms and then with its own aesthetic.
Some cities spectacularized the traditional street with marketing functions to attract tourism and leisure. In some cases roads are treated as artifacts of the past nostalgically restored and returned to an ideal state. The sense of belonging to a community to the road is now gone, an actor that has encouraged this process is the car. This has led to a consequent proliferation of typological models which are not related to roads such as big box shopping mall, which internalize and privatize public space as a surrogate of the road
Cities have in past developed on the crossroads, in places of transition, the first settlements were born on the streets, urban centers from the places of exchange. It is important to understand what is the role of figures of the path in the urban quality. The interest is focalized especially to the infrastructure as a mean of normalizing space and as a servant space for traveling an moving from one place to an other. On the other hand the space of mobility has been also object of project of re-qualification that has interpreted these spaces with the ancient vocation of the street as a social place.
Starting form the first archetypes of the line, the labyrinth and the grid it is possible to re write the grammar of the project of the path, able to interpret the complexity of the hybrid urban spaces as the sprawled city trough the creation of new “streetscapes”.
Thus the space of the path hybridizes the urban tissue and the rural and natural ground, trough different design strategies (layering,integration,pollution), rewriting the edges of the path as contemporary public urban space.
Mobility in this sense is not only a quick glance at the landscape but is also a place of transition between travelers and those who remains, between nomadic and sedentary , it can combine the perception of the traveler who enjoys the scenery without denying the sense of security and privacy of those who live places, the space of the route can be slow, an urban promenade that overlaps and intersects the dynamics of flows. As in the fictional town of Calvin, Esmeralda, it is possible to identify a stratification of pathways, slow and fast, of different nature but with the common feature of the dense weave of textured places.
Infrastructure and landscape, urban or of the open space, are in two-way relationship and may lead to a single project. The artifacts such as roads, highways, railways, walking, cycling trails lay of the land and enrich the meanings and help to create the landscape, understood as a stratified reality and closely linked to human action, the cultural landscape.
Archetypes, grid maze and line
Path is a movement of a subject in a space with a certain size and length. The term path can take different meanings and connotations, and in particular it is possible to trace back the path to certain archetypes.
Through the understanding of the archetypal space of the route and its variations and can detect an interpretive key for reading the phenomena of contemporary space. The theme of the path originates from relational changes in contemporary society. It is a theme rich in the enunciation of its forms and manifestations. The incipit of the research is to redefine the figures of the journey, starting with a careful definition of the archetypes that are the basis of a reformulation of the current term. Archetypal configurations are extremely important because in every part of the world they belong to the same principles. The phenomena that are the basis of urbanity belong to categories of the route (the road) and center (the square).
Archetype, composed of greek arche “origin” and typos, “footprint”, is the original model of a shape, is a term used to define the philosophy of the Platonic idea of the shape in Paradeigma sensible things are simple copies. The process of abstraction and generalization is the man to recognize things. S. Agostino De Diversis Questionibus defines’ archetype as idea principalis, model and condition of things for their intelligibility. In a discussion of diachronic you can search some archetypes that underlie the contemporary definition of run, these archetypes are arrays giving rise to the definition of concepts and existing paradigms.
Mobility reminds of archetypal figures since motion in space is a vital act . Motion is the need to move from one place to another and is one of the first activities of the human being. As Norberg Schulz notes life is first of all motion and it has rithm and direction. motion is therefore an existential symbol which reflects the dimension of time: this process can also lead to a significant point where time becomes permanent. Movement has different rhythms and dimensions,it can be short, extended slow or fast.
The first archetypal patterns of mobility can be identified in the grid and in the labyrinth. From the definition of these categories it appears a strong distinction between archetypal path infra structuring and originator, as the grid and the archetypal path as an element of instability and accidents that is synthesized in the maze.
The cyclomatic labyrinth shows the structure of the net. Postmodernism identifies the city with the maze, as David Harvey says city is thus a multitude of paths that endlessly intertwine in ways that are always different and in a confusion of directions. The post-modern lives are uncertain and unstable because of this condition, the labyrinth of our cities is made of widespread successive and overlapping layers and the lack of a center creates a sense of disorientation in the population. Identity of the historical city is today lost in a multitude of meanings and forms.
Grid is opposed in meaning to the labyrinth. It is an archetypal figure, because it determines the texture of the fabric of the settlement and it is structuring, it is the place of movement as opposed to the place of rest, it represent the access to spaces and functions. Grid is chosen by Moderns as a way to control of space, space normed by the grid is in fact an uniform space, easily controllable and theorizing. Is thus used by rationalists as ideal scheme that represents a strong sign , unitary and solver. Wright’s Broadacre City is one example. The planning grid has been present since ancient times and can be attributed to Hippodamus from Miletus.
Straight line is the simplest way to connect one point to another. “Norberg Shulz says that road imust satisfy one of the fundamental needs of human life, which is related to the movement. it is one of the first signs of human intervention over nature reflection in its evolution the progress of human life.
From the understanding of the archetypes it’s clear how space of mobilty in its deeper meaning belongs to public space. Since this strong relationship has been lost in times and translations it is possibile, referring to the first archetipe, to reorient the project of spaces of mobilty to the public realm. Is then possibile to work at the edge, over and on the infrastructures.
Operations planning: Strategies
The space of the route has always been linked to sociality, the space of the connection involves the exchange with others, the contact area where you can reach others. The road looks is an archetypal figure of public space. The road and the square characterize the public space of the city.
Infrastructures may cause changes when introduced in the landscape of the historic fabric or of the open space. Recently infrastructural projects have prevailed in the form of suppressing the ancient morphogenesis processes, in the suburban areas infrastructures also have removed functions from the town centers, disrupting it and creating congestion and marginality. it is possible to use urban design to hybridize the space of the route with the existing urban settlements, with the landscapes traversed by integrating them.
The search for a new urbanity and identity of sites is only possible with a careful reading of the existent. Understanding the context it is possible to understand the reasons and hardships of places in order to bring out the dominant traits through the trait d ‘union, the common thread of mobility. The elements that were common names in the classical city today, in the widespread city are unrecognizable; there is a need to change syntax to create and write a recognizable soil. Contemporary city is complex and layered, hard to read and interpret, it is necessary to experiment narrative approaches that consider relational and procedural aspects of places. Processes layered, like a palimpsest, are the memory of the place and thus establish relationships of continuity and discontinuity.
In this scenery the answer comes from the deep comprehension of the archetypes of movement,that can lead the project to interact with the complexity of the contemporary spaces.
These path can thus be the strong armature for a new kind of public space in the contemporary city. This space will be hybrid and complex, in plan and in section and it will react in different ways with context. Spaces of movement become a part of the project, rewriting the soil and interacting with existing and new functions. Some operations can be used in the process of re-writing space. These are layering, integrating, hybridizing. These strategies are accomplished through a pair of oppositional operations.
Stratify: hide / reveal.
C’è una lunga distanza nella quale l’architettura si dissolve nel paesaggio, il quale emerge nella sua dimensione geografica, (…) Solo i grandi tracciati si rendono realmente presenti insieme a qualche infrastruttura notevole.. .F.Purini, Lo sguardo dell’architetto.
The first project strategy is stratification, overlapping or juxtaposition of layers and levels. This strategy can be obtained with the concealment of the artifact or by its unveiling, the manufact emerges as an architectural sign in the context, and becomes a sculptural and architectural landmark. Stratification is an operation that can be applied to landscape design.. In urban parks the viaduct is elevated over high-density fabrics or hides underground becoming a freeing the ground space for other functions. Different levels overlap and intersect.
A precursor project is by Lawrence Halprin, Freeway Park in 1976. The experience of Halprin takes place in the sixties in the United States and in Europe, he founded a progressive interest in the description of urban space and in the perception of cities and countryside. Lawrence Halprin and his wife Anna, contributed to an interesting research in these studies. Halprin foresees the need to monitor the impact of freeways in the contemporary city and in 1966 he writes “Freeways,” a text on the problem of designing the first major highways in California, a theoretical premise of Freeway Park in Seattle. In the book and in the project he achieves the goal of integrating the large arteries road network of new creation in the contemporary existing without causing fractures and breaks in the urban fabric. The city for Halprin is a landscape that also includes the human dimension. The interstitial space is therefore an opportunity for the project. The intervention provides Superelevation of the highway to create a lush urban park, pedestrian spaces separated from vehicular flows , the coverage of the motorway is a garden from which you can admire the passing flows while the noise of the waterfalls covers and masks the noise. The park along the highway is a meeting place for rest and relaxation.
1 Integrate: osmosis / contrast.
A second design strategy is integration. Street and landscape are now in conflict with each other, but some projects consciously attempt to integrate them into a single project. Some contemporary projects have set themselves the goal of integrating road and landscape, creating a harmonious and productive relationship through osmosis or the contrast of elements.
Integration implies at the same time, the ability to connect different parts and components, preserving the specificity of the individual components. Unity and recognition of the various parts is resolved in the balance and the relationship between them, a transformation in the starting configuration that produces a new system by altering the parts.
Particularly in France in recent years, several designers have addressed the issue of roads in the landscape. With this meaning it can be read the experience of French motorways that expresses the search for a balance between infrastructure and natural landscape, the highway becomes the instrument of representation and use of the soil by establishing new hierarchies and new values for the contemporary territory. Strategic importance of traffic routes in European growth and an environmental sensitivity drives the administrations to seek ways of combining development with environmental protection and landscape preservation.
These projects were assigned to multidisciplinary teams, Bernard Lassus, Pierre Donadieu, Alain Roger along with others from different backgrounds and experience prepared the guidelines for the integration of highways in the landscape. The road takes the value of a “piece of kinetic art”, elaborating the theory of perception of the landscape in motion. The peculiarity of the landscape traversed is revitalized while the motorway becomes the occasion for the territory itself. The parking areas are designed as intermediate resting points, as gardens leading into the surrounding landscape.
2 Hybrid: disperse / incorporate
The strategy of hybridization provides an osmosis between the path and the context. The path incorporates elements of the landscape ctaminating and dispersing in it. This strategy applies especially to the figures of intensity and go back to the archetype of the labyrinth. These pathways may in fact involve sourrounding elements creating focal points of routes and extending with a thin white thread that unravels in the landscape. This strategy emphasizes the horizontal nature of the road, that is, its thickness. This action plan turns the sreet in a system of “boulevards”, introducing a scale as measured to the context.
In Holland the space on the roads has quickly become a predominant factor in structuring urban geography and territory. The planning provided the VINEX plan that monitors the growth of urban systems and reflects on the possible shapes of the transformations in the projects of infrastructure.
The program “Roads to the Future” launched in 1996 by the Dutch government develops new scenarios on the issue of mobility and proposes to make a concrete contribution to the quality and architectural space through a reflection on the rural and the urban through a series of guidelines, or pilot projects.
Among these projects is part of what rioconfigurazione space off the A12, between Deen Haag and Germany. In the Netherlands the system of highways has transformed the image of the country.The study on the A12 formulate possible intervention strategies.
Monolab proposes two strategies: the separation of traffic according to different speeds,modes and assumption at a variable time as a resource project.
National flows are separated from those at a regional scale with a double-speed on multiple roadways. The highway turns into a system of freeways in parallels with fast lanes for local traffic,numerous entrances and access to nearby areas and a series of ramps connecting articulating the links. Molnolab contemplates the creation of a “Infra-Deck” a Infrastructured deck, this system, declined according to the specific contexts crossed, permits, according to the author, to have a “transversal vision” to the infrastructural project, based on a new hierarchy. This emphasize the need to contextualize the infrastructure and the ibridation of the street to the public space. Such aim is identified in 4 thematic areas (land, nature and landscape, urban development, infrastructure) that, referring to a wide range of issues, express a strong relation between infrastructure projects and spatial planning.