«Quest’opera di Klee è rimasta per me un quadro simbolo. Se non si è riusciti a evitare lo scoglio dell’obbedienza a un desiderio di strutturazione senza poetica, se la strutturazione diventa troppo forte e costringe la poetica all’inesistenza, ci troviamo in effetti al limite del paese fertile, ma dalla parte della sterilità. Se invece la struttura spinge l’immaginazione a entrare in una nuova poetica, ci troviamo allora nel paese fertile». Pierre Boulez, Il paese fertile. Paul Klee, 1989
GIOVANNI BATTISTA COCCO
LA DERIVA DEL PROGETTO URBANO PERDERE E RIPRENDERE LA ROTTA
09 Collana Alleli / Research Comitato scientifico Edoardo Dotto (ICAR 17, Siracusa) Nicola Flora (ICAR 16, Napoli) Antonella Greco (ICAR 18, Roma) Bruno Messina (ICAR 14, Siracusa) Stefano Munarin (ICAR 21, Venezia) Giorgio Peghin (ICAR 14, Cagliari) I volumi pubblicati in questa collana vengono sottoposti a procedura di peer-review La pubblicazione è stata realizzata con fondi “Contributi d’Ateneo per la Ricerca” di G.B. Cocco, Università degli Studi di Cagliari.
ISBN 978-88-6242-241-3 Prima edizione Luglio 2017 First edition July 2017 © LetteraVentidue Edizioni © Giovanni Battista Cocco È vietata la riproduzione, anche parziale, effettuata con qualsiasi mezzo, compresa la fotocopia, anche ad uso interno o didattico. Per la legge italiana la fotocopia è lecita solo per uso personale purché non danneggi l’autore. Quindi ogni fotocopia che eviti l’acquisto di un libro è illecita e minaccia la sopravvivenza di un modo di trasmettere la conoscenza. Chi fotocopia un libro, chi mette a disposizione i mezzi per fotocopiare, chi comunque favorisce questa pratica commette un furto e opera ai danni della cultura. Nel caso in cui fosse stato commesso qualche errore o omissione riguardo ai copyrights delle illustrazioni saremo lieti di correggerlo nella prossima ristampa. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, even for internal or educational use. Italian legislation only allows reproduction for personal use and provided it does not damage the author. Therefore, reproduction is illegal when it replaces the actual purchase of a book as it threatens the survival of a way of transmitting knowledge. Photocopying a book, providing the means to photocopy, or facilitating this practice by any means is like committing theft and damaging culture. If any mistakes or omissions have been made concerning the copyrights of the illustrations, they will be corrected in the next reprint. Book design: Giovanni Battista Cocco, Francesco Trovato Translations: Ilene Steingut LetteraVentidue Edizioni Srl Corso Umberto I, 106 96100 Siracusa, Italy Web: www.letteraventidue.com Facebook: LetteraVentidue Edizioni Twitter: @letteraventidue Instagram: letteraventidue_edizioni
INDICE
7
PREFAZIONE di Pasquale Belfiore
11
INTRODUZIONE
21 23 39 47
QUESTIONI TEORETICHE Il pensiero urbano La dimensione della metropoli La continuità del progetto
55 57 85 93
QUESTIONI PROGETTUALI Gli elementi spaziali Gli elementi esistenziali Gli elementi variabili
99 101 105 127
QUESTIONI INATTESE Progetti alla deriva Perdere la rotta Riprendere la rotta
155
BIGLIOGRAFIA E CREDITI
171
ENGLISH TEXTS
PREFAZIONE di Pasquale Belfiore Università degli Studi della Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”
Il progetto urbano. Cimento sempre difficile con il tema di maggiore fortuna storiografica degli ultimi cinquant’anni in Italia e forse in Europa. Impari, se lo si affronta nella sua ascendenza teorica che richiede concorsi plurimi di competenze e comunque autori capaci di poderose sintesi storico-critiche che da tempo non si vedono nella nostra disciplina, dai Samonà ai Tafuri, per intenderci. Cimento periodicamente necessario e, auspicabilmente, di buona fattura, se non si vuole disseccare una delle sorgenti con la maggiore portata ideativa e progettuale del Novecento architettonico. Cimento opportuno infine – ed è il caso di questo saggio di Giovanni Battista Cocco – quando si propongono utili compendi selettivi di quanto è stato detto e scritto sull’argomento e si delineano inedite ipotesi interpretative che conferiscono rinnovato vigore storiografico al tema. Risultato degno d’attenzione, destinato a suscitare interesse nel dibattito in corso. Obiettivo per nulla scontato, perché è generalmente alto il livello su cui s’è venuto articolando il confronto tra visioni differenti del progetto urbano. Qui di seguito, tre aspetti del saggio meritevoli di messa in evidenza con brevi chiose. La tesi. È riassunta nel titolo con deliberata ambiguità: per Prefazione, di Pasquale Belfiore
7
QUESTIONI TEORETICHE
Paul Klee, Angelus Novus, 1920
IL PENSIERO URBANO
Quando nel 1989 Manuel de Solà Morales pubblica, nelle pagine della rivista Lotus, il suo contributo per Un’altra tradizione moderna, intende mettere in contrapposizione due pensieri sulla città. Il primo fa riferimento alla Carta d’Atene1 – manifesto della ‘città funzionale’, scritto durante il IV Congresso Internazionale di Architettura Moderna (CIAM) del 1933 e pubblicato, in forma anonima, nel 19412 – in cui si delinea una rottura col passato e una precisa idea di spazio che prevede la separazione tra edificio e strada, ovvero, come osserva Bernard Huet, la costruzione di un piano costituito da oggetti isolati, nel quale lo spazio pubblico è considerato come ‘spazio residuale’: un vuoto definito da forme, ma di cui il progetto non mostra particolari attenzioni3. Il secondo pensiero riconosce la città come artefatto complesso sul quale il progetto agisce per sovrapposizioni e nel quale l’urbano evolve per intromissioni e innesti. Questa via è la risposta della seconda modernità ai fallimenti della prima e alla rottura che ha dato col passato; essa, come scrive Marcel Cornu, guarda la città come un’entità autonoma «poco sensibile alla storia che non la segna in profondità se non nella longue durée»4 e cerca di riassegnarle un po’ della propria vita e dell’attrazione perduta. Il pensiero urbano
23
QUESTIONI PROGETTUALI
Giò Pomodoro, Frammento di vuoto, 2005
GLI ELEMENTI SPAZIALI
Il processo di metropolizzazione dell’insediamento urbano in Europa – il carattere policentrico e multipolare con cui si dà forma al territorio non urbanizzato – pone alcuni interrogativi in merito ai nuovi luoghi del progetto. Essi, a una prima analisi, possono essere ricondotti alla tradizionale coppia oppositiva centro-periferia, nonostante questa espressione registri un significato più esteso rispetto a quello che aveva nel passato. Il centro è stato, infatti, per la città, e per lungo tempo, la sua parte generativa, il luogo in cui il magister urbis ha collocato i ‘temi collettivi’ – la chiesa, le mura, i palazzi civici, la piazza, le torri, i teatri, le porte, … – governando, con sapienza e maestria, addensamenti e rarefazioni urbane; esso è una matrice di riferimento da cui trarre le storie e da cui misurare la distanza fisica, sociale, materiale, per la progettazione di nuovi brani urbani. In Italia, a partire dalla seconda metà del Novecento, tale significato è progressivamente venuto meno a favore di un processo di sostituzione, prodotto sia da un’avvertita assenza, generata dal policentrismo urbano, che da una concreta decadenza, per ragioni di natura igieniche. Su questo percorso si sono aperte due vie: la prima ha delocalizzato questa figura simulandola, senza ben Gli elementi spaziali
57
LES HALLES Una centralità in area storica
> Contesto Città Parigi Dipartimento Primo arrondissement Localizzazione Centro storico Distanza dal centro Relazioni di scala Centro urbano e banlieue
> Dati Generali Superficie 10 ha ca. Servizi di trasporto principali Bus, Metrò, RER
> Interventi Progetto urbano SEURA Architectes (David Mangin), 2004 Progetto architettonico La Canopée des Halles: Berger Anziutti Architectes, 2016 Progetto di paesaggio SEURA Architectes e Philippe Raguin, 2004-2018
Lettura alla grande scala
Les Halles
0
28
69
Progetto per Les Halles, 2016
74
La deriva del progetto urbano
Plastico per La CanopĂŠe des Halles, 2010
Les Halles
75
PIRELLI - BICOCCA Una centralitĂ metropolitana
> Contesto CittĂ Milano Dipartimento Milano-Sesto San Giovanni Localizzazione Periferia industriale Distanza dal centro 6 km ca. Relazioni di scala Centro urbano e periferia
> Dati Generali Superficie 70 ha ca. Servizi di trasporto principali Tranvia
> Interventi Progetto urbano Gregotti Associati International (Vittorio Gregotti, Augusto Cagnardi, Michele Reginaldi), 1986 Progetto architettonico Gregotti Associati International, 1986 Deutsche Bank: Gino Valle, Studio Italo Rota & partners (allestimento), 1997 Progetto di paesaggio Gregotti Associati International (Vittorio Gregotti, Augusto Cagnardi, Michele Reginaldi), 1986
Lettura alla grande scala
Pirelli-Bicocca
0
15
77
Immagine dell’area Pirelli-Bicocca, 2006
82
La deriva del progetto urbano
UniversitĂ degli Studi di Milano Bicocca, 2006
Pirelli-Bicocca
83
ENGLISH TEXTS
PREFACE
by Pasquale Belfiore University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”
The urban project. It is always difficult to face one of the most important topics in the architectural debate of the last fifty years in Italy and perhaps even in Europe. It is a one-sided discussion; and when tackled in its theoretical primacy, it requires multiple disciplines and authors capable of powerful historical/critical syntheses. Such figures have been absent from our discipline since the era of the Samonàs and Tafuri. It becomes a periodically necessary and, hopefully commendable, effort if we do not want to destroy one of 20th century architecture’s sources having the most important conceptual and design potential. Lastly, it is apt - and this is the case here in Giovanni Battista Cocco’s publication - when a useful compendium of selections regarding what has been said and written about the subject are proposed with new interpretations that confer renewed historiographical vigor upon the theme. The results are worthy of attention and are sure to arouse interest within the ongoing debate. Such results should not be taken at all for granted because the level of the discussion regarding urban design is generally high. In the following paragraphs, I will point out three aspects of this deserving volume, accompanied by some brief annotations. The thesis. The underlying thesis is summed up in the title with deliberate ambiguity: for one of the most modern cornerstones of the modern movement, urban design, a redeeming drift attained by losing and recovering routes. Words (and concepts) from the postmodernist lexicon (and philosophy). It is almost an oxymoron, one might say right off the bat. And in point of fact, Cocco never uses the term. The authors he cites most frequently and most of the titles in the bibliography do not betray the genre, yet the book’s overall structure and the concatenation of his thinking seem to land upon this unprecedented and critically sustainable hypothesis. There are some very good reasons for this. One is the book’s clear structure, resolved in its organization around three ‘questions’: the
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La deriva del progetto urbano
first two, classically articulated as ‘theoretical’ and ‘design’, the third, with an expression that is anything but modern, the ‘unexpected’, evoking anti-classical cultural tones. Another reason lies in the many passages of explicit, but undeclared, postmodernist value: a design praxis that remodels theoretical propositions, and not vice versa as the modernist approach would impose; recovering bygone concepts and authors like the ‘open structure’ and Henri Bergson’s concept of time, widely used in postmodernist thought; the praise of arbitrariness as a choice to oppose the determinism of modernism’s mighty project; the primacy of urban design over architecture by virtue of the processual nature that animates it. And then there are the projects chosen to represent the loss of the route (Romanina in Rome, happily defined as a large land development with some public works) and its recovery (Plaine Saint Denis in Paris, equally as happily defined as a strategy more than a project). These are new theses and as such, elicited some initial caution. A subsequent and more careful reading recognized their underlying rationale, well deserving of discussion. The four eras of urban design. This is the aforementioned useful compendium. The different formulations of the theme, chronologically expressed over the course of the 20th century, are here ordered in an analysis that is among the best parts of the book. The first era is that of the European modernist movement. The second is a chapter regarding a part of Italian history that should make us proud because it displayed our architectural mastery – from Samonà/Muratori to Rossi’s Neorazionalism – on the world stage. The third coincides with De Solà-Morales’ rewriting of urban design in which there are clearly evident signs no longer associated with traditional modernism. The fourth is the contemporary era, marking a remarkable conceptual distance from the initial conditions and where there is even space for Renzo Piano in urban design, which would have been a bizarre hypothesis just a couple of decades ago. Two emerging themes: the unity of architecture/planning and the autonomy/heteronomy of architecture. These ideas are barely touched upon in the volume, of course, but are duly recalled insofar as they are central to the series of different formulations of the urban project. Regarding the former, we all know that the idea of unity between architecture and urbanism was an abstract goal. Samonà, and also Piccinato himself, imagined that architecture ‘became’ urbanism without increasing the scale of the project but rather its structural conception. As such, the theme was already contained within the idea of urban design. As for the latter, it is the very lack of expression of the autonomy of architecture that generated the growth of its heteronomy. It is dangerous, writes Cocco, if this is understood as the multiplication of as many projects as the disciplines in our profession, but it is necessary in reference to the idea of listening to others, from administrators to residents to associations to interest groups. Once again, we might agree, it is an approach to a cultural condition that is more postmodern than modern.
Preface
173
INTRODUCTION
Over the past two decades, the literature concerning the urban project in Europe has been enriched by studies and research regarding the field of design. Numerous scientific inquiries sought to interpret the fine line between architecture and urban planning through disciplinary approaches that were often linked to the different authors’ varying cultural backgrounds and research proclivities. Perhaps the richness of such studies can be traced to a contingent problem that Philippe Panerai pointed out at the end of the 1990s as a phenomenon that the discipline needed to face. This was the crisis of urban form which, having relinquished such goals as creating public space and seeking new relationships with the existing context, also questioned the concepts of ‘modification’ and ‘belonging’, meaning the ability to reconstruct new architectural and urban content1 on the ‘traces’2 of an existing fabric, with no ‘do-overs’. From the 1950’s on, the dimensions of urban projects grew. They were often characterized by isolation, repetition and structural monotony. Open space was trivialized. Housing was not projected into public space. The single family dwelling3, considered the only valid alternative, proliferated. It was difficult to construct places for work and commerce within the new residential fabric, just as it was to improve urban ‘walkability’4. In this scenario, the challenge lies in refining our ability to imagine an urban fabric that can accommodate the legacy of the past, even the most recent one, but above all promote realistic analyses of present conditions, not only regarding formal matters and the ability to modify the city’s “figures”5, but also economic and social ones. This relates to the ‘new urban question’ that Bernardo Secchi addressed in his last book, in which he directly confronts social inequity and the multidimensional nature of wealth and poverty. These imbalances can be analyzed by using indicators like those deriving from economic policy and tied to labor and public spending. But, as Carl Schmitt argues, if every
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La deriva del progetto urbano
political idea is always projected within a space, just as all spaces can be traced to a political idea6, the social welfare indicator does not only concern a greater or lesser amount of money associated with people, but also the possibilities for individuals to gain access to the ‘spatial capital’ in which they can live, express themselves and activate processes of ‘cultural accumulation’. In this sense, the dichotomy between ‘the city of the rich’ and ‘the city of the poor’, as Secchi discussed, is the result of lack of democracy, a kind of selective exclusion, which translates into spatial division and competition. Design can address this ‘new urban crisis’ by reading the forms of a territory - and the environmental and landscape structures that govern it - in order to shape the porosity, accessibility, and permeability of collective space with actions that can create an aura of “anti-fragility”7; in other words actions that can prompt the city to grow, evolve, adapt, and improve starting from disturbance, uncertainty8 and the unpredictable, by means of small and pervasive interventions9 (‘great works’ rather than ‘large works’) that can reverberate their effects on a scale that goes beyond their own spatial dimensions. What remains to be understood in the renewal of urban studies regards the tools used to construct urban form that is more interesting than the mere sum of its parts. But this was already a well-defined problem; we need only think back, for example, to the critique of the concept, ‘city by parts’. The crisis in the construction of the city had already been recognized at the end of the 1980s, when Manuel de Solà Morales, in retracing the evolution of urban design, from the rift in the 1930s to the second phase of modernity, pledged to find a foundation for new practices regarding urban project. He analyzed what had been generated by the urban ideology proposed in 1920s Germany under the illusion of uprooting a new urban image from the past: specialized functional zones, attention to vehicular traffic and opening up of closed spaces in the name of public hygiene. Alongside these practices, which created an inexorable distance between architecture and the city, Ludovico Quaroni, Cornelis Van Eesternen and Leslie Martin, moving away from this approach and the Athens Charter, considered it to be a complex artifact to be acted upon through superimposition, allowing the city to evolve through infringements and “implants”. The themes underlying the experiments with the modern urban project were those that recognized grandiose civil architecture and urban infrastructure as central to public housing districts within large-scale visions embracing architecture’s monumental and landscape power. Based on the teachings of these masters, Manuel de Solà Morales outlined the foundational principles for modern (urban) design: “Urban design means taking the geography of a given city, with its demands and suggestions, as a starting point, and introducing elements of language with the architecture to give form to the site. Urban design means bearing in mind the complexity of the work to be carried out rather than a rational simplification in the urban structure. Moreover it means working in an inductive manner, generalizing what is particular, strategic, local, and generative (...). To define projects as urban design we can define five points:
Introduction
175