The Trace of the City’s Structure: The Evocative Representation of Settlement Through the Montage Technique

Abstract

In architecture, it is now a consolidated practice to involve a process of critical approach and historical knowledge before the design phase. This need is even more evident in reconstruction contexts, such as the Old City of Mosul, where the project is required to return some of the city's identity features. That practice, conventionally understood as the passive collection of data, is however susceptible to a more active approach, the production and interpretation of a conceptual and abstract condition of the city, capable of also capturing the data not immediately visible and latent. Mosul presents an urban structure composed essentially of primary monumental elements around which spontaneous residential fabrics have developed, almost disordered in their overall appearance as a solid mass, only excavated by open spaces. The proposed experiment concerns the creation of a cognitive map, a virtual state that recognizes and enhances the generative settlement structure of the city starting from certain type-morphological invariants—the introverted character of the enclosed settlement; the structure of compensatory open spaces such as courtyards and patios; the density of the settlement with a prevalent horizontal development; the scalarity and hierarchy between public and private spaces, etc.…—that identifies and represents the modalities of an otherwise indeterminate spontaneity. The result is the reconstruction, or reinvention, of the meaning of places through a methodological instrument of investigation suspended between the recognition and interpretative condition of a survey and the limited structure of a possible design conformation. If the reconstruction cannot be satisfied with mimesis but requires an evolutionary and transformative vision of the city, this tool is configured as the link between identity and transformation, a synthetic act between knowledge and the inductive capacity of the project to emphasize some of the authenticity assumptions of memory, even in an evocative and conceptual reworking.