Piazza della Pace. EFA studio di architettura, Parma, Italy

In the reconfiguration of the postmodern city, squares and public spaces are currently in search of a new identity, in an attempt to recover the meaning that has always been attributed to them within the Italian cultural context. The square as an urban archetype and a gathering space for the most significant social units, as a geographical, organisational and morphological centre of the city, and as a nodal element of its natural module of growth and understanding. The linguistic, functional, organisational characteristics of open spaces, no longer interpreted as negative areas in the urban fabric, are now seeing a resurgence in the way they characterise the main proposals for transformation of the most important metropolitan systems in Europe, delegating to the square the role of amplifier of the values and contradictions of an architecture which now no longer has a single direction from a morphological and functional perspective.