New Housing Projects in Latin European Cities

Abstract

The reinterpretation of recent residential interventions in northern Italy, the Madrid metropolitan area and the ZAC Masséna project in Paris highlights the specific quest that has emerged in the new millennium: the return to the compact city, to experimentation with the urban block and to revive the role of the street. With criticism of the open design of the Modern Movement, complete, contemporary projects are able to rethink the concept of the urban block through the morphological wealth that good twentieth-century architecture managed to produce. Paris imposes a series of classical compositional themes to its open block, such as the continuity of the podium, while Sanpolino in Italy achieves great urban diversity with a wealth of typological offerings and density.