Urban assemblage, repair, ragionevolezza

The contribution is conceived as a conversation between Filippo Cattapan and Angelo Lunati, respectively in the guise of theorist and architect, on the possibility of a rational architecture that is not based solely on technical and material issues, but also and above all on disciplinary ones, of formal, urban and compositional nature. A critical and theoretical reflection will be accompanied by a timely exchange on a series of projects by onsitestudio, Milanese practice of which Angelo is partner together with Giancarlo Floridi. In particular, the following case studies will be discussed: the Sassuolo football centre as an example of construction linked to the building tradition of its territory, the Garibaldi block in Milano as a prototype of urban transformation and strategic prefabrication, the restoration of the former Ansaldo factories as an adaptive reuse of industrial space, the design of the new BEIC library as public monument and passive energy device. If the contemporary condition of scarcity undoubtedly calls for a substantial technical rationalisation of building practices, this must not become, in our opinion, the first horizon of an architecture. The current tendency to direct design discourses on sustainability appears needed as much as risky, as it seems to lead towards a new disciplinary hegemony of technique. This reductive form of technical rationalism is exactly what post-war architettura razionale has struggled to escape. In opposition to a mere aesthetics of sustainability, that is often rendered with an appearance of bricolage, we will propose to revisit once again a broader tradition of thought, a bricoleur rationality based on the notions of context, urbanity and continuity. It is the tradition of Adolf Behne and James M. Richards, but also of Aldo Rossi and Oswald Mathias Ungers, of Colin Rowe and thus of Isaiah Berlin and Karl Popper. It is also the natural field of a certain Milanese rationalism, we might perhaps say pragmatism, on which onsitestudio has reflected at length and in whose trajectory they have tried to place their work.