Analisi e progetto per la definizione della forma urbana

This essay addresses two questions, commencing from an assertion that architecture’s primary task is the building of places: spaces with a recognizable formal identity. Consequently, it is inconceivable to separate the definition of the urban form and its constitutive principles from that of the architectural project and architectural composition. Urban design is a matter of composition, and architecture is the necessary tool to define the places of a city, to bring form and measure to the voids. Architecture and city are two facts inextricably linked by virtue of a common goal. This, at least, has been the premise of the urban studies which have typified Italian schools in past decades, applied to a search for relationships between typology and morphology: an essential legacy for any reflection on the city and the project. The problem which remains open concerns the relationship between analytical studies and the project, that is, the autonomy of these two stages or any consequentiality. The essay advocates a relative autonomy for the two stages, both equally necessary and to be placed consecutively, in order to guarantee the analytical phase a cognitive capacity, and for the project, freedom and soundness of judgement. Moreover, it is argued that the essential nature of this relationship can also be extended to the city’s fringes in addition to the Old Towns, the subject of the first studies, where what changes is not so much the relationship, as the principles which define each of the two variables.