To create order out of the desperate confusion of our time

To create order out of the desperate confusion of our time in Crossover. Architecture, Urbanism, Technology. Rotterdam, 2006. The paper, starting from the urban situation in Italy and from the contribution of Italian studies to urban analysis and to the idea of city, stresses the research by L.Hilberseimer and L. Mies van der Rohe. The urban expansion processes, by extending the outer urban areas, created a strong disorder in wide areas once rich in history, memory and identity. The settlements of the past which used to be cornerstones in the constitution of the territory, tend now to lose the strategic role as settlement regulating elements. Italian research (especially in Milano and Venezia) has been able to build around the mid-sixties within the universities a true school of architecture, based upon the search for general principles shared and recognizable. This research has been a fine tuning of the characters related to the typological-morphological analysis of urban facts founded upon scientific methodologies applied to historical materials using a comparative procedure and techniques based upon the fact-finding inquiries of cartography, topography and building forms. Today the theme of the idea of city is neglected and considered anachronistic by positions believing chaos as an inevitable phenomenon and also a full expression of the contemporary condition. The issue is discussed from the theoretical position expressed by L.Mies and L.Hilberseimer.