The Places of Houses

While the house is the most private place of life, its quality results from the collective and urban space that, combined with others, it achieves. Until the nineteenth century, in the old city this place was typically the street, a place of frontage and relations, and the landscape of the house itself. The crisis of the principles of construction of the modern city requires a new definition of the nature and shape of this space and, as a consequence, of the compositional principles of housing and its settlement units. While the remarkable tradition of studies developed on this issue during the twentieth century opened the block and replaced the street with parks and gardens, the question is still pretty much open. The essay offers some examples and proposes a meditation starting from the project for a large decommissioned area in Milan.