A NEW ‘LOSS OF THE CENTER’

The persistent crisis experienced by architecture in recent years is related to the wider cultural struggle which is reflected in the “loss of the center” that, interpreted by Sedlmayr more than fifty years ago as a transitional phenomenon, denounces by now an irreversible change in every area of knowledge. In architecture the process has taken place in a complex way and advancing an univocal interpretation can be misleading. However recent sprawling processes clearly identify the breakdown of previous monocentric balances. On one hand the removing, more and more rapid, of the original centralities, on the other the appearing of new urban polarities that are no longer comparable to gravitational reference knots.It is a passage that, in addition to causing a shift from the mono-nuclearism of the ‘centered’ to the multipolarity of the “a-centrate”, provokes an important change in the scale, connected with the transformation of the three interrelated levels of the relationship between city and countryside, center and periphery, internal and external.The sprawling explosion therefore carries drags an important consequence: the center is no longer the highest concentration of presences, the maximum integration of functions or the highest expression of the service equipments, but it becomes the weakest node of the dialectic among centered and peripheral settings. By no longer constituting as antagonistic and referential polarizations, the two quoted entities promote foster a shift towards the new relationship between internal and external urban, implying a definitive relativisation of both quantitative levels on the ground and dimensional scales. They are replaced by relational scales linked to the new temporality of the communicational flows, according to a system of multiple connections that new urban nets establish between portions more or less distant from the original nucleus.Starting from this observatory, we can say that ‘intermediate space’ now takes more importance and becomes a significant threshold of design transformation, since it is no longer related to the opposition of individual parts (whether they are city-countryside, center-periphery, interior-exterior) but to the more conscious dialectic between the‘extension and contraction’ of the dwellings, where artifice and nature constantly exchange their settlements; according to a movement intercepting, it also forms an evident hybridization between the two contending realities, fully involved in the formation of a new ‘common’ design. These fragile territories then coincide with the place of the project, an intermediate space of coexistence of different conditions, where only a relational approach can open to new living conditions.