Research project

Ph.D. doctorate of research in Architectural Composition. Università IUAV Venice

2007

The technical-regulatory vision of the current urban planning deludes itself that it can solve the problems of the contemporary city on an abstract-informal plan made up of numbers, indices and quantities. The result is an unrestricted city-periphery, created from the post-war period onwards. Instead, shifting the gaze again on the aesthetic level, we can see a hierarchical landscape: two urban features, Venice and Mestre/Marghera emerge from the background of the lagoon and the mainland, furrowed by canals and modern infrastructuring. The project aims to reinforce the peripheral territory of Mestre, by containing its expansion within "urban rooms" which follow the markings of the elevated canals and background roads.

The issue of the post metropolitan landscape image that revolves around mobility and its generated by accelerated transformations is not so much about fragmentation, arbitrary growth and the detachment caused by new infrastructure, all this as the expression of necessary technical and individual freedom, but the lack of a frame that serves as counterweight and restores a recognizable representation of a unified landscape with hierarchy, were is possible to see the differences between FIGURE and GROUND, between primary elements and isolated events. In this project for a residential area along Mestre's ring road, the urban figures of Padua, Treviso and Venice stand out from a background land that will be divided into recognizable units acting as URBAN ROOMS by intentionally underlining the existing roads, settlement layout and water infrastructure. The edge of the "rooms" emerge as slopes from the water canals and roads to reinforce the background structure, to separate the paths and enclose the contemporary settlement developments.