Front door spaces. A time-based approach to the ground floor design

The time-based approach to design explores the chronemic dimension of spaces, based on chronotopes and temporal morphologies, not only spatial ones. This mode of research and analysis shows that the 20th century has predominantly been designed on the principle of “peaks of the curve”, of maximum capacity, oversizing spaces instead of ensuring flexibility and adaptability useful in situations of minimum or medium crowding. This approach to design has produced cities that are compact in their buildings, but empty – over long periods of time – inside. The mono-functionality of some spaces has led to a system of short switching on and long switching off that is now unsustainable from an energy, social and economic point of view. From the urban to the domestic scale, there are spaces that we use sporadically and yet occupy territory. These are not large empty spaces, capable of hosting new projects, but “emptied micro-areas” that have the vocation of becoming buffer spaces, places of social and territorial reconnection, multi-scalar, and multi-temporal places available to local communities. The porous city absorbs criticalities, peaks, making urban and spatial structures less fragile and, instead, softer to transformations. A mapping of the emptied micro spaces, harnessed in architecture, shows that the most significant percentage will increasingly concern the ground floors of buildings. Starting with proposals such as Carlos Moreno’s ‘15-minute city’, passing through Superblocks projects in Barcelona and the Dutch policy aimed at 20-minute cities, it can be assumed that new models of time-based development will reshape cities in the next decade. Ground floors can become empty places to be redefined: mending the relationship between the mobility of the street and the fixity of a building; guaranteeing an active lung for that walkability or slow mobility which dangerously tries to carve out its own paths; consolidating those neighborhood units that are more active online, rather than offline, encouraging those networks of randomness that the city has stifled by changing relationships and the sense of place.