Rigour and Respect for the Urban Context

Abstract

How to consider the project intervention in an urban context which is conditioned by the existence of special buildings that express a significant historical character? Against a widespread tendency that considers his own critic operate of living the contemporaneity as an expression of the ‘being’ as a revelation of his own time, a school of thought is outlined, proposing the designer’s critical action through a proactive research field that subordinates authorship in favour of an intentionality conditioned by the constitutive phase of the ‘being’ within which to intervene. It is to this second research line that the project of the in-line building for commerce, offices and apartments in Canosa di Puglia refers to. It reads reality not as a temporal instant, but as a process that has in itself the law of its unfolding. It pursues a perspective of transformation with a critical horizon based on the concept of historical continuity and of an organism made up of parts, congruently connected to each other. The building is on a plot located on the north corner of a small street-block. It attempts to establish a complementary relationship with the surrounding area, especially with the historical ‘emergencies’. The renunciation to an aesthetic readability of exaggerated and useless intentionality is based on a programmatic desire to consider the new intervention as a ‘temporary lacuna’ of the existing urban fabric. Therefore, the recovery of the autochthonous character and the adherence to the models of behaviour of the local constructive tradition have suggested a set of design choices aiming at privileging the ‘environmental value’ and denying an attitude of solipsistic alienation from the context.