New Architectural - Urban Rooms
Nilda Valentin
Facolta' di Architettura 'Valle Giulia' - Universita' di Roma La Sapienza
Master in Architecture - Georgia Institute of Technology
Master in City Planning - Georgia Institute of Technology
Dottorato di Ricerca in Composizione architettonica - La Sapienza
Post Dottorato in Composizione architettonica - La Sapienza
Ricercatore universitario - Facolta' di Architettura 'Valle Giulia'
The fast infrastructural and physical changes of many of our contemporary cities have frequently implied the lack of continuity between architectural or urban parts which taking the shape of disorder spots in the urban landscape barely integrate in their environment. It is only when in the territory of the project exists more ample connotations of scale and functional relationships, from those usually present in the same, that it is possible to talk about the development of a project at an 'urban scale'. A term aimed to define an architectural or urban proposal that, with new kind of spaces, connections, paths, activities, not only goes beyond the building's 'boundaries' to influence a more vast urban territory, but often accepts the entering of the city inside the same to develop a new kind of 'urban room'.
Spaces in-between architecture and nature and/or the built environment become, as a result, a place of 'osmosis' of different kind of architectural, cultural, natural and social conditions specific to the context which provoking the research for a new kind of plurality create a new type of spatial 'hybridization' that helps to complete the 'missing link' between architecture and place.
The aims are to energetically engaged and stimulate a fructiferous synergy between both the project and the different conditions of the place and the various urban parts to obtain a final effect for the most expected to be larger than the 'sum of the effects of the individual parts'.
When the project in addition to respond to the complex functional, distributive, technical and technological requirements of the program searches, albeit implicitly, for solutions capable to understand the DNA of the place and, therefore, to answer to a wider variety of morphological, infrastructural, historical, and social relationships specific to the place, it is in the position to develop new kind of associations and meanings that become a new 'added value' to the project.
Architecture at an Urban Scale
The means are to develop an interactive and inter-scalar design process between architecture and city, in which to the distributive and the inside-outside relationship of the project are associated the search for continuity and specificity with the site and therefore the development of an extended dialogue with all or part of the city.
The development of a project at an urban scale becomes therefore here proposed as 'principle of construction' of the city which, reflecting the actual contextual, cultural and structural conditions, is able to become an ordering, defining, connecting, generating instrument of new functions and social activities.
The autonomous, independent 'project at an urban scale' is as a result to become a constituent unit of an harmonious group of organic relationships with the preexistences, with new constructions, with topography, with geography, with history, with nature, in the conformation of a new urban system of public spaces, paths, architectural forms, internal 'urban rooms', capable to reflect the intrinsic functional complexity of the new uses while constructing places for people's activities.
The project organically inserted in the existing urban facts, going beyond the stereometrical and fundamentally introverted abstraction of a mere design, as a consequence qualifies itself as an interlocutory event with the now dynamic system. It becomes a 'constructive moment' capable to stimulate the urban or territorial requalification of an area with a qualitative project that can use the potentialities of its scale to achieve the urban and civic values needed for the rehabilitation or completion of the various city parts.
A New Urban Order
Through an approach aim to obtain harmonious and coherent developments in the city it is possible to realize strategic projects that not only respond to the design problems related to the questions of content and expression but that develop and predispose a 'new urban order' in the city. In fact, during the analysis of the margins and the influential territorial area of a development the project at an urban scale in a certain way anticipates an 'idea of city' on its being a place of relationships in the built environment.
The 'project at an urban scale' is able to represent a vision, a cultural tendency, sometimes utopian, that acts as stimulus for a gradual and overall improvement of the city. A vision form by a single or group of buildings whose spatial and volumetric conformations generate private and public places so rich of identity as to be easily recognizable in the city and to it embedded in the organic sense. A vision that being for its nature multifaceted, with either homogeneous or heterogeneous characteristics, with either small, medium or great dimensions, with either simple or monumental forms, compact or vast volumes, infinite or limited conformations, regular or fluid, structured or variable shapes, it represents a unique whole able to dialogue and enrich its surroundings with a new vital meaningful spirit.
In fact, it is through its architectural language, spatial organization and articulation, use of materials and building technologies that it is possible to recognize in the project that there is an intrinsic search both for unity and formal coherence and for continuity with its own surroundings.
It is therefore in the fragmentary nature of the various visions, sometimes refer to as 'urban episodes', the 'city of parts', the city of 'emergencies and fabric', the city of 'primary and secondary events', the city of 'monuments and buildings', the 'collage city', that in the absence of an expression that sums up the diversity of the conceptions in the construction of the urban environment that the concept of the 'city as an assemblage of ideas' is here proposed as the place where 'new urban orders' come together to generate over time new types of landscapes, associations, measurements and meanings in the contemporary urban areas.
New Urban Rooms
When the strictly programmatic and functional aspects of the projects are instead completed by 'hybrid' spaces and forms designed to integrate architecture and place within the building in such a way as to render them mutually interdependent we are talking about the creation of 'new urban rooms'. Spaces in which the city, drawn into the architecture, become an integral, unifying and essential part of it. A design approach that sees the considered development of the urban issue as the foundation for architecture.
With the creation of large public spaces within major buildings as elements of connection between architecture and city rises a new sustainable architectural condition where people and environment dynamically confront to each other.
Spaces such as galleries, that evoking in a modern way the passages parisiens and the old nineteenth-century galleries create a striking extension of the urban space into the building; or garden roofs and pedestrian passageways, that going over or through the buildings break the traditional 'in and out' spatiality to generate a series of public areas within important institutional and cultural buildings, become a special urban hybrid event capable to develop unique places for people's leisure time, orientation and circulation.
Urban Intentionality
The idea of fighting the fragmented city remains, whatsoever, one of the most complex challenges in the hands of the architectural and urban culture. So far the formal coordination of the city has been paradoxically researched with the functional tool of the zoning, with the development of plans of large districts, with the study of hierarchical vehicular and pedestrian systems, with the making of connected structural nodes as instruments to create unity in the urban context.
To this line of thought coming from the structuralist approach are flanked, for the most part, those of the 'laizzes faire' which predominates in many urban cities, that believe in the power of the fragment as a legible order in the midst of chaos, that is, in the concept of 'ordered spots and erratic interstices', as proposed by Rowe and Koetter, or in the need to live with the contradictions of the place, as claimed by Venturi.
In the search for a method to create new kind of urban orders and meanings in the city by means of new constructions or rehabilitations projects that may produce an architecture at an urban scale, it is fundamental to think at the project not as an isolated urban episode but as an instrument to provide rich and positive connotations to the context, for this reason, the need to give to the project a quality that may be called 'urban intentionality', a fundamental condition to achieve the 'hybrid' integration of the parts and systems involved in the development of a convincing and genuine sustainable city.
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01 International Competition for the Transformation and Urban Renewal of the San Lorenzo Area, Rome (1st Prize ex-aequo) - Nilda Valentin (team leader), Ruggero Lenci, Stefano Catalano. Aerial view from the Main Station Termini.
02 International Competition for the Transformation and Urban Renewal of the San Lorenzo Area, Rome (1st Prize ex-aequo) - Nilda Valentin (team leader), Ruggero Lenci, Stefano Catalano. Aerial view from San Lorenzo area
03 The Image of the a City - Nilda Valentin
04 International Competition for the New Soccer Stadium in Siena - Nilda Valentin, Ruggero Lenci (team leader), Claudio Merler, Lorenzo Poli, Rinaldo Rustico
05 International Competition for the Restoration of the Concentration Camp of Fossoli as a National Museum, in Eternal Memory of the Victims, and as a Park, Fossoli (Selected) - Nilda Valentin, Ruggero Lenci (team leader), Stefano Catalano, Giuseppe Massari (botanic consultant)
06 National Competition for the Highway Service Area "Prenestina", Rome - Nilda Valentin (team leader), Ruggero Lenci
07 Multi-confessional Church, Paris - Nilda Valentin
08 National competition for a Catholic Church entitled to S. Pio da Pietrelcina, Rome - (Second prize ex-aequo) - Nilda Valentin (team leader), Ruggero Lenci
09 National competition for a Catholic Church entitled to S. Pio da Pietrelcina, Rome - (Second prize ex-aequo) - Nilda Valentin (team leader), Ruggero Lenci. View from the neighborhood main street entrance.
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