City as Organism

Iconarp International J. of Architecture and Planning

The article proposes the study of the phenomenon of architectural and urban "knotting", which the author considers one of the most interesting in the formation of the modern city. It consists in the transformation of a special serial organism (consisting of units repeated and substitutable among themselves) in an organic structure, where the elements are linked together by a relationship of necessity, through the formation of a nodal space. In Italy this phenomenon is quite evident in the formation of new building types for public services, as in the case of the large post offices obtained by transforming existing buildings and then designed ex novo with the knotting idea, giving rise to some of the most important architecture of modern Italian architecture

2015

The first course in Urbanism at the School of Architecture of Alcala is organized in two related parts, theory and practice, and introduces students to urban design and planning. On the one hand, students acquire a solid, yet incipient, theoretical knowledge and, on the other hand, they start designing projects in the city. Both tasks are part of a morphological approach that inherits some methods from Manuel de Sola-Morales’ Laboratori d’ Urbanisme de Barcelona and some from the Italian school.The theoretical part is subdivided into two segments. First, the main concepts of the morphological approach are presented to students, who are then exposed to a brief history of the traditional city and its urban form, from the Pre-industrial era to the urban renewal in the 1970s.The practical part includes both analysis and proposal. The analysis deals firstly with the structural scale, framing a site through different inquiries; secondly, it looks closer at diverse morphological aspects. I...

Proceedings 24th ISUF 2017 - City and Territory in the Globalization Age, 2017

The "Network city" and its crisis Over the last decade we have been witnessing the effect over the territory of the worldwide propellant of the globalization processes. As an immediate consequence, one can remind the progressive weakening of the "Network city" (Marzot, 2006 i). This urban model was intended, since its inception, development and forerunning application, to take over the role of Planning in the management of the territorial transformation and to supersede it with urban and territorial marketing multimodal infrastructure to group existing cities into clusters, considered coherent to down strategy. This overarching process was developed at the expenses of national and local interests, almost completely disregarding the effects produced onto the already established communities. Therefore, if the "Network City" was apparently unfolding an unlimited capacity to multiply opportunities, by increasing movements of people, goods, information and resources, it was pursuing its goals by being very selective and exclusive with respect to the existing framework. As a side effect of this overarching strategy, the dominant urban model Abstract. Over the last decade, we have been witnessing the progressive weakening of the so-called "Network City", indented as the sheer embodiment of the globalization driving forces. This phenomenon mostly occurred because urban model. It progressively delivered an increasing amount of waiting lands and building vacancies over the territory. Emptiness suddenly appeared as the "culture of congestion". Recycling seems to be the immediate reaction to the building standstill and it is nowadays widely accepted as the most promising strategy to face the crisis of the city, especially within Europe. This statement respect it becomes fundamental to reconsider the forerunning contribution of Urban Morphology and Building Typology. In fact this discipline, since the second half of the '50 of the XX century, because of the necessity to reconstruct Europe after the Second World War, was pioneering the necessity to read the Form of the city beyond any ideological prejudice, superseding the Modern approach. As a consequence of this attitude, the city was even more intended as a "manufact" constantly transformed through the different historical promising future for our cities.

New Urban Configurations, Roberto Cavallo, Susanne Komossa, Nicola Marzot, Meta Berghauser Pont, Joran Kuijper (eds.) , 2014

The papers considers, with a comparative approach, the architecture of vertical connections and city edges. We hypothesize that the city edge, when its elevation overwhelms the surrounding urban fabric, cannot be redesigned within a basic typological repertoire. This research considers the transformations of the edge in historical towns, taking into consideration the architectural models used and investigating the contextual deformations impressed. The design of vertical connections between different city levels redefines the image of the city from its meaningful points of view, changing the collectively recognized city image. A repertoire of models, divided into typologies according to the morphology of the site, is the base for a new theory outlining which parameters (i.e. measure, elevation, slope, and major urban nodes) to use to deform models in each context. The study cases range throughout the history of architecture, focusing on some pre-modern examples such as Laurana's Torricini façade in the Palazzo Ducale of Urbino.

Enhancing, within the educational teaching of architectural design, the strong continuity between the typological evolution of the built organism and the building to be designed (Petruccioli, 1998) can greatly improve the architectural design process. From the territorial scale, to the scale of the urban tissues, the understanding of the coherence of paths and settlement patterns within a given site morphology, is the prerequisite for the proper design of the built organism. The paper will illustrate some case studies, in Latium, Rome and Cyprus, focused on the knotting process (Strappa, 2013) and the Muratorian design method (Maretto, 2013), underlining the strong continuity (Whitehand, 2012) between the Conzenian approach and the Italian School of Urban Morphology (Marzot, 2002). From the form of the site and the diachronic evolution of settlement patterns, it is possible to infer the transformation to propose with the contemporary design. The territorial scale is therefore the speci c methodological base for the full understanding of the scalar properties, veri able within other scales, such as the urban organism scale, the urban tissue scale, and the built organism scale. (Cataldi, Maffei, Vaccaro, 2002).

The main trouble for a big city - as a megalopolis - is the disintegration of the traditional Forma Urbis idea and of the urban identity. Even if in the US metropolis is characterized by exasperated serial iteration, made in this way in just 3 centuries, is still possible to recognize the necessary relationship between different territory parts and it’s still clear the dialectic between buildings and countryside, between downtown and periphery, between housing and production area. While in new realities everything is uncontrolled and often reduced to shapeless heap of built up. The concentration of millions of inhabitants, as a result of an extreme process of urbanization producing an amplified confusion of urban spaces, is causing a new and unexpected level of use the area and the downfall of every social equilibrium. This kind of places are ruled by the indifference of the whole hierarchy built and lack an order well-balanced between housing, Tertiary’s sector areas, commercial areas, production areas in all urban space scales possible, as is made in the best tradition of the city (in metropolis too). This space is assuming the paradoxical “a priori shape” aspect and seems in lot of its parts equivalent and homogeneous. New icons of representation, the so-called “containers”, are accidentally put into the city, as effort to ri-polarize it. These are complex urban situations and architectures that seem to evocate today the fast dynamism condition, typical in the new millennium, showing ephemeral dimension and communicate the idea of transparency, lightly and movement. The courses “Typological and Morphological Characters of Architecture ” and “Architectural Design”, in the Department dICAR, Polytechnic in Bari, left to the writer, are focused on the research on the evolutionary process that recalls, generally, the urban complexity and also to spread the necessary knowledge to understanding urban development. Moreover the ways that urban organism shows itself, with its contradictions, considered in a conceptual "shape", are the beginning of the planning thinking. This attitude, especially reported to the complex urban situations, express our capacity of being able to be active in our epoch, through a critical and not parasitic exercise breaking with the past but in continuity with what has been historically transmitted and inherited.

2020

233 The morphological studies about the transformations of cities have been made in the last fifty years following different “morphological schools” according to countries, cultures and theories. We will present our own theoretical and practical view points, based upon a sociophysical dimension of architectural design following architectural and planning ideas by Spiro Kostoff, Alberto Magnaghi, Mikhail Bakhtin, Paul Ricoeur, Bill Hillier, Rainer E. Zimmermann, and others, in the sense that, in between the design poetic prefigurative act, the morphological configurative studies of cities and the anthropological refigurative surveys of the users, specific emergent powers develop in the making of the cities, in a socio-physical and space-time structural chronotopic manner. Instate of a confrontation in between the prefigurative poetic views of architects and planners with the configurative outputs of the morphological studies or with the refigurative analyses of the social behavioral ...

Urban Morphology, 2015

This paper compares four different approaches to urban morphology: historico-geographical, process typological, space syntax, and spatial analytical. It explores in particular the use of four fundamental concepts proposed in these approaches: morphological region, typological process, spatial configuration, and cell. The four concepts are applied in a traditional gateway area of the city of Porto, Portugal. The area includes considerable variety of urban form. The main purpose is to understand how to combine and co-ordinate these approaches so as to improve the description, explanation and prescription of urban form.

The present study aims to define a new urban typology, and to present a typological analysis of the modern city and the urban fabric through examples and contexts in the Austro-Hungarian cities. The development of an appropriate morphological methodology is the starting point of the studies, which is based on practices of Conzen and Caniggia, since the Italian school and the English school urban morphological practice do not fully satisfy the object and the purpose of the investigation. Via innovative re-interpretation of these practices can be formed the typo-morphological analysis used in the study of the dualist cities.