INSIGHTS SITE LINES Shaping spaces for people
Architect and professor Fabrizio Rossi Prodi offers five principles for creating residential developments with rich and diverse opportunities for social interaction as well as a distinctive character, with a particular focus on social housing
(Arbitare Sociale – Social Housing, published in 2014) and tested in real projects, such as via Cenni in Milan, and Teramo, also in Italy (illustrated below). I saw these ideas as a new ‘humanistic’ approach to architecture and especially to urban, common space.
A 1. Giving form to community values
The first issue deals with the city and its values. New residential settlements do not respond exclusively to a constructive or func- tional logic, they are not just a piling up of economical box-shaped structures, and most of all they do not stand in isolation. They require the construction of a piece of urban fabric and owe a respect to the city’s existing compositional principles and rules: its morphological typologies, systems of mass and emptiness, scales and measures of the existing urban fabric and the social flows and systems of relationships. In short, they attempt to rediscover the profound identity of place, however ‘suburban decay’ can be the existing local situation, ie architectural and social decay, and absence of urban quality. So, whether the construction is in an area of suburban decay or simply in the outskirts of a town, the source for identity of archi- tectural and urban space – required to be transplanted into new settlements – is actually to be sought further away, sometimes in
the character of city centres, or in the forms of landscape patterns, or even in new proposals of clustering.
Identity can be found not only in the physical forms of the fabric itself, but also in the cultural expressions and in the spirit of the community. This is the task at hand: not just to build boxes or to sculpt a volume, but to create a scenario that can highlight the values of a community or help to create one through the design of fragments of urban fabrics and their open spaces. Nowadays, instead of volumes, our design tool is outdoor space and voids that have to be conceived, arranged and connected; the design of new facades and masses is not a goal in itself, it is rather a means to shape urban space and to conceive its life. In a way, the ‘street’ pattern can be seen as the key concept for a humanistic development that goes beyond the usual two dimen- sional drawings, and conjures space with the third dimension of facades, volumes and voids, and even a fourth dimension (time),
research project on social housing and new residential neighbourhoods across Europe helped me to learn a few lessons and form some ideas that I wrote down in a book
This is the task at hand: not just to build boxes or to sculpt a volume, but to create a scenario that can highlight the values of a community or help to create one
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ADF OCTOBER 2016
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