Orizzontalità e verticalità. L’architettura tra radicamento alla terra e conquista del cielo. Horizontality and Verticality. Architecture between rooting and sky conquering.

Today’s urban settlement, subdivided into fabrics, networks and junctions, is analogous to partial cities, which often interact but at times conflict: an over-lapping of structured layers, which are autonomous but at the same time inter-sect in hot spots that define their points of exchange and interconnection. The city, no longer organically divided up into parts and functions, emerges bereft of identity, mass produced, anonymous: public space, which has always represented the vertebral col-umn of urban systems, ends up being weakened in its essence in favour of elements relating to this multifaceted city. Internodal places are complex and multi purpose, able to respond dynamically and articulately to the new social demand and local and global networks are interwoven within them in an un-defined unicum where horizontality and verticality alternate in a polycentric and diffused pattern. The persistent hierarchy of factors involved does not particularly identify a pre-defined pyramidical structure, although it incorporates the idea of bi-polar attractions continually chasing each other, where the urban elements which make up the system are inter-related and multifaceted. We live in a world which is urban: al-though cities take up less than 3% of the planet’s surface, the inhabitants of Earth live and work mainly in cities, and there is a tendency for this dynamic to be repeated, generating their inevitable growth and variety, in number and size, reflecting different styles of life. The socio-economic conditions of the last decade have driven the organisa-tion and management of urban sys-tems, resulting in the strengthening of territorial identity through widespread regenerative activity, competitive not just in respect of the local or supralocal metropolitan context, but in relation to the diffused scales of international matrix.