Conference Proceedings - NUL | Full Papers Session 2 | by Planum n.27 vol.2/2013

SESSION 2

Visualizing the Past, Imagining the Future

CHAIRS: ANTONELLA BRUZZESE, SOFIA MORGADO

NUL

NUL - NEW URBAN LANGUAGES

BY PLANUM. THE JOURNAL OF URBANISM ISSN 1723-0993 | WWW.PLANUM.NET PROCEEDINGS PUBLISHED IN OCTOBER 2013

Introduction

Try to interpret the urban phenomenon means, first of all, facing with the times of the past and projections of the future. The everyday life in the city has to deal with continuous reconstructions and stories of the urban past as much as with imaginary and scenarios of many possible times to come: the future of the expected changes, the future of urban decline, the future of the loss of identity in the large metropolitan regions. Visions and imaginary thus become indispensable tools for connecting the course of fragmented time inside cities. Quoting Jude Bloomfield we can say that: “The memory, history and identity of a city are not the emanation of an enclosed, hermetically sealed, ‘pure group’ and their past, but the ongoing social construction of people with diverse histories whose lives intersect a specific place. Therefore the urban imaginary is also inherently intercultural but located, cosmopolitan but rooted”

SESSION 2

Visualizing the Past, Imagining the Future CHAIRS: ANTONELLA BRUZZESE, SOFIA MORGADO

Territorial branding strategies behind and beyond visions of urbanity. The role of the Fuorisalone event in Milan Antonella Bruzzese, Claudia Botti, Ilaria Giuliani Railway station and urban transition in China Zhen Chen Memory of the space. A cognitive way of thinking G.M.A. Balayet Hossain Urban transformations. The ghetto of Rome in the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century Elisabetta Liumbruno The retro-active effect of the cyberspace on physical space: the iper-dense city Debora Magri The Fluvial City: change and representation. Case of Dora Riparia Natalia Kudriavtseva Historical - virtual reconstruction of an Italian garden.

Imagining the past of Villa lo Zerbino Anna Toth, Davide Spallazzo Chinese expression of the urban landscape. The contemporary spatial strategies of the traditional Chinese courtyard building Tan Zhu

Territorial branding strategies behind and beyond visions of urbanity The role of the Fuorisalone event in Milan Antonella Bruzzese Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies Email: antonella.bruzzese@polimi.it

Claudia Botti Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies Email: claudiabotti.cb@gmail.com

Ilaria Giuliani Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies Email: ilaria.giuliani@mail.polimi.it

The interest of this paper concerns the relation between territorial branding strategies and the creation of urban “visions” tied to creative industries. The aim is to understand these relations through a focus on the role of the Fuorisalone event towards new spatial configurations in Milan.

Fuorisalone – the annual event of the international Milan Design Week – was one of the triggers for the creation of new images for specific areas in Milan and the consequent branding process, establishing a network of attractive zones.

But what is behind and beyond the uses and the perceptions that this new paradigm of visual images, languages and marketing tools is able to create? The paper offers an investigation around the dichotomies between the construction of brands and the urban spaces within an overlapping of physical configurations, social interactions, media representations and temporary perceptions.

Keywords: Territorial brand, urban regeneration, creative industry, Milan, Fuorisalone

1. Introduction: Milan: a global node for fashion and design Milan is an international node for design and fashion production, in terms of trend setting and related manufacturing. Being known worldwide as a fashion and design capital, the city and the wider Lombardy

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Region are characterized by a spread distribution of small, medium and large businesses connected to this kind of production; furthermore, Milan is a major R&D and formation center for design and fashion subjects (Jansson and Power, 2010).

The choice of focusing the research on this particular city and on how the relation between territorial branding strategies linked to particular events and the creation of urban “visions” tied to creative industries are shaped in it, comes from many rooted reasons linked not only to the contemporary global image, myth or brand that Milan embodies, but also to a cultural tradition made of artisanal fashion and design products, age-old handicraft and firms varying in size from multinational corporate groups to local micro-firms that goes back to the ‘50s (Bosoni, 2003; Branzi 2003).

Furthermore, given the global status of Milan in fashion and design, the specificity of the fairs and events and the scale, variety and number of participants, this city demonstrates a sort of breadth and intensity of activity and could be considered an ideal and quite unique case to study the widest range of phenomena and of dichotomies between the construction of brands and the urban spaces.

Indeed promotional events, like the design and furniture trade fair – Salone del Mobile - have literally changed large parts of the city, exploiting that certain vocation and diffused knowledge about design and creativity that are “in the air” in Milan.

In this perspective the cycle of events that merge together Milan with those creative activities, happen in certain places within the city and it’s arranged within an almost continuous global network which increases itself year after year. It seems that there are some clear hierarchies and strategies that are taken in account to implement the circuit of places to brand.

This dense concentration of functions, with their specific features and stories, responds to a precise territorial branding strategy that is both an important business in its own right, as well as a constituting an heterogeneous set of interlinked stories, images and narratives on the city.

Research methodology This research work is part of a wider research project started in 2010, which looks at Milan as a creative city and investigates some specific creative areas, their processes and effects within the urban environment (Botti 2012, Giuliani 20101). Analysis and data collection took different forms: fieldwork conducted during repeated visits, walks, and explorations to the branded areas both during the Fuorisalone weeks and in regular periods of the year; direct observation, conversations and interviews at different levels of formality with event visitors, promoters, exhibitors, retailers and inhabitants within an ethnographic approach to focus on participants; qualitative analysis of published and online materials – documents, websites, magazines, press releases, catalogues, brochures, guides – produced within the documentation of the event.

2. Milan and its ‘creative atmosphere’: between urban concentrations and temporary locations The city of Milan is composed of a complex and changeable geography of activities related to the sectors of immaterial production (fashion, design, arts, communication and exhibition spaces) that take shape and meaning within the city following permanent and temporary logics (Botti, 2012; Giuliani, 2010). These presences are growing and spreading into the urban territory interesting not only the core of the city – traditionally characterized by representative centres of cultural consumption – but also affecting new semiperipheral areas (Bonomi, 2010; Bolocan, 2009).

A first interesting feature of the Milan ‘creative atmosphere’ is related to the spatial distribution of creative industries. A dense presence of activities and operators is clear within specific parts of the city that can be 1 Antonella Bruzzese was the supervisor of both the master thesis by Ilaria Giuliani in 2010 – “Dismissione industriale e città creativa. Due processi di trasformazione urbana tra riqualificazione fisica e strategie di promozione del territorio: i casi di Zona Tortona e Ventura Lambrate a Milano” – and by Claudia Botti in 2012 – “Territori in trasformazione nel segno della nuova economia: “addensamenti urbani creativi” a Milano sud-est”. (Urban Planning and Policy Design Master, Faculty of Architecture and Society, Politecnico di Milano).

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considered as creative urban concentrations (Botti, 2012).

This urban phenomenon is visible at different scales. On one hand, there are specific neighbourhoods mostly characterized by the presence of small and medium-sized disused (15-17.000 sqm) industrial buildings that have been reused as locations for creative industries. This is the case of the areas around Porta Genova (Giuliani, 2012), Lambrate (Giuliani, 2010), and in some areas of the southern-eastern part of the city (nearby Viale Spartaco, Via Tertulliano and in recent years also around Via Ortles) characterized by different concentrations of creative production operators (Botti, 2012).

On the other hand more punctual episodes can be found. In this case the presence of creative production activities is related to singular former industrial areas of important dimensions. Similar dynamics interested some big complexes in Milan such as Fabbrica del Vapore, Frigoriferi Milanesi and the Mecenate area.

In both cases the presence of abandoned industrial buildings represents a crucial point for the development of physical and functional transformations and for the attraction of new uses tied to immaterial productions. The availability of spaces, the structural quality of the buildings and the real estate operations to foster the regeneration processes are the principal conditions for the creation of creative urban concentrations. The proximity of workers belonging to similar productive sectors is also able to attract more activities, create new urban profiles and increase the visibility of specific territories.

The Milan ‘creative atmosphere’ is also made of events and temporary occasions related to the immaterial production that show their presence within the city during particular periods of the year. This is the case of some international well-known events according to the fashion, design and art sectors.

The widely affirmed fashion weeks, the annual Milan design week and the more recent MiArt fair represent some of the most important dates. During these events many temporary functional transformations and new practical uses interest specific parts of the city that become important attractive areas and central node of events and exhibitions.

Creative urban concentrations and temporary locations of events often overlap each other on the Milan urban territory creating a strong relationship between them and emphasizing the image of specific parts of Milan as real “centres of creativity”.

3. The role of the Fuorisalone in Milan Milan’s annual International Furniture Fair – globally renown as Salone del Mobile – is one of the most influential events happening in Milan - which attracts trade visitors, journalists and exhibitors from all over the world.

Started in 1961, the fair has developed along the years into a family of concurrent trade fairs, branded Milan Design Week, covering furniture but also lighting, kitchens, bathrooms, textiles, etc.

Thus during the design week, Milan’s official fairground – just outside the city – accommodates all these trade fairs, while the rest of the city is given to the mercy of more punctual creative activities.

At the beginning of the 1980s this last uncodified and spontaneous phenomenon involved only young and emerging designers seeking alternative locations around the city, but year after year this trend gradually expanded, giving birth in the 1990s to the Fuorisalone, the biggest satellite event that now fills every industrial space, street, showroom and gallery with endless initiatives, events and exhibitions and involves several districts of Milan.

3.1 The launch of the Fuorisalone within Tortona Area: the pivotal case The story and the development of Fuorisalone event is strictly tied to the transformation process of theTortona area, which has been deeply and inextricably sustained by the creation of a new image for this territory.

Located in the south-western part of Milan and bound between the Naviglio Grande canal and the railway, Tortona is characterized by a huge variety of urban elements composing the landscape, belonging both to the productive and residential vocation of this area.

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The location of vast industrial sites dismantled in the 1960s – together with a flourishing network of small and medium enterprises, handcrafts laboratories, workshops, garages, railway tracks, traditional architectural typologies as the case di ringhiera, eating houses and social housing neighbourhoods – constituted the opportunity to trigger the regeneration phase, achieved by a self-organizational process and launched by the aggregation of individual building renovations.

It has been argued that this bottom-up preservation case has mainly involved two different patterns of transformation: the built environment renovation on the pending ex-industrial areas to settle creative industries and cultural firms, and the territorial identity creation (Giuliani, 2010, 2012).

This last immaterial dimension made of promotion and communication strategies was precisely initiated by the role of those unedited designers who in the 1980s exploited the renovated ex-industrial spaces to showcase their work contextually with the Fair.

When Interni Magazine published the first volume of the guide to Fuorisalone in 1992, the inseparable binomial between Tortona area and the Fuorisalone was officially established. Somehow this event constituted the spark that triggered the promotion strategies, then fulfilled in 2002 into the creation of the territorial brand Zona Tortona (promoted by the agency Recapito Milanese). Its function was basically the one of gluing together all those initiatives that were already and independently well established, including them in an acknowledged symbol as part of the same entity. The red round logotype (figure 1)2 became unmistakable and was used in producing flags, pocket maps, guidebooks and road markings for the Fuorisalone week events.

Figure 1. Evolution of the ‘Zona Tortona’ logotype

3.2 The Fuorisalone and its territorial branding strategy Along with the consolidation path of the event, more and more locations and several parts of the city – in different way attached to creative or cultural sectors and productive or consumptive activities – have been involved by this huge phenomenon, implying the necessity to identify new visions and consequently formalize them through territorial brands (fig. from 4 to12). In the perspective of creating a dense network of design districts, urban branding is not merely a process of image construction, but it is fundamentally a process of image communication and consumption (Jansson, Power D, 2006) Interni is still nowadays handling the management and coordination of all the events and activities referred to Fuorisalone, animating unconventional spaces through creativity, opening parts of the city that are usually closed, letting them become public spaces for a week and fostering great impact for the territorial promotion and international visibility of those areas of Milan.

Among the most relevant stakeholders that created the Fuorisalone event we find Studiolabo, which coordinates the relations between events and locations through the portal fuorisalone.it, and Esterni Magazine, which sets up performances and stands all around the town.

All these subjects collaborate and cooperate in a perspective of city marketing, which, following the success of the Tortona area pivotal case, aims to launch and infuse the event everywhere in the city, and 2 In 2011 Design Partners srl – the evolution of the company that founded the brand of Zona Tortona – bankrupted following legal issues. A new name and a new logotype under the name of Tortona Design Week were created for the event by the Tortona Area Lab association, a no-profit organization set up in 2010 by the big names pioneer of the regeneration of the area.

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push the image of Milan as a capital of fashion and design on the global panorama of quality creative economy (Hannigan, 2003).

We argue that the strength of this event does not consist only in its innovative and creative contents, but especially in its different shapes of bonds with the territory.

In this sense, Fuorisalone proposes a different urbanity for Milan that, in certain cases, lasts even after this unique week. This new urbanity has not been planned at all top-down by local governments – quite differently from other examples of territorial marketing strategies and creativity policies traceable in other European cities or in literature – rather it presents a self-organizational nature of all the initiatives, talents and energies that are embedded in the territory.

Figure 2. Fuorisalone 2006 – Source: Fuorisalone.it

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Figure 3. Fuorisalone 2008; Figure 4. Fuorisalone 2011

Figure 5. Fuorisalone 2013 – Source: Fuorisalone.it

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4. Between “hard” and “soft” transformation: the role of branding strategies The territorial branding strategies linked to Fuorisalone progressively growning in the city during years show a sort of coincidence between the activities to promote and the places where they take place.

What has been promoted is not only the presence of showrooms and creative activities, but a whole "zone". This does not necessarily corresponds with the idea of the neighbourhood, of which definition in the past was based on the presence of significant centres for everyday life (the church, the square, the market, the main neighbourhood shops). The “zone” is defined by the presence of a series of other places: design or fashion studios, art galleries and so on. “Zones” and neighbourhoods have the same urban scale.

Nevertheless, the term zone, in the branding rhetoric, from one hand emphasizes the distance from the dimension related to daily life and inhabitants. But at the same time implies the identification of creative functions on a territorial basis, strongly situated, which can easily be also extended to other activities (bars and restaurants in the first place, but not only) able to build what Zukin (1995) calls "atmosphere". It is not a coincidence that guide-books in recent years have begun to be organized by areas and districts and not just for "monuments" and attractive places, and Lambrate Ventura is named the “Chelsea of Milano”: it confirm the relevance of the diffuse atmosphere of an area that marketing campaigns try to promote.

Trough marketing languages and tools (brochures, internet communication, video, advertisement), the brand Zona Tortona and Zona Ventura and other similar (like as Brera Design District, Porta Romana etc) have tried to promote specific areas in the cities following processes of self-recognition. The same entrepreneurs who had the main role in the physical interventions of the areas, at a certain point of the process, identified the great potentialities linked both to urban transformation and construction of atmosphere able to attract new and different city users. This perception of potentially being a new area with a strong identity and a new centre linked to the design circuit, fed the branding campaign.

The promotion of the different Zones and the new images of those specific parts of the city is definitely linked to the Fuorisalone events. Without this frame the marketing of the areas have not had the same success.

But which is the relationship between branding campaigns and urban changes in these “zones”? Or, in other words, between "soft" transformations - mainly related to the logics of communication - and "hard" transformations of spaces and artefacts? Observing the case studies in Milano, we can recognize at least four different kinds of relationship that can help us in defining the role of Fuorisalone events, and the urban images it promotes, in the process of urban transformation. a. Synergy In the case of Zona Tortona, and to some extent also for Zona Ventura, the definition of the brand is coming up at some point in the process of "hard" transformation. The historical reconstruction of the events (Giuliani, 2010) shows how the same entrepreneurs who have settled with their activities in those areas invited media professionals to devise marketing strategies and to promote in those spaces the localization of events related to Fuorisalone while the process of transformation in neighbouring areas continued to involve other lots. This seems to outline a relationship that could be considered overlapping and mutual influence between transformations of spaces and uses and a new image. An image - apparently linked to the events, the presence of creative industries and addressed mainly at a specific kind of user that tried to super-impose to the district, also facilitating the process of further concentration of activities, which take place simultaneously.

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Figure 6. Zona Tortona, Fuorisalone 2010; Figure 7. Brera Design District, Fuorisalone 2013 Figure 8. Mecenate Area Design, Fuorisalone 2013

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b. Framework A second kind of relationship between transformations and branding strategies is the one that we can recognize observing Brera or Porta Venezia. Even here, the Fuorisalone has arrived and communication agencies have created the brand “Brera design district”. These histories and places are totally different from the previous ones. The transformation of an historical area of the city centre in a venue for showrooms, mainly concerns the internal structure of the building’s ground floor. (done by big design firms, although the localization in "downtown" is not directly linked to the economic size of different actors). In these areas, the attempt of Fuorisalone to build the image and the brand of new zones or design districts proposing new urban identities is limited to the period of Design Week and overlaps with other urban images of those places. The relationship between spatial transformations and brand building – here more than anywhere else temporary and overlaid on a more rooted urban image – takes on other forms.

In Brera, in particular, the brand “Brera Design District” arrived when the concentration of these creative activities and its role as a central area in the itineraries of Fuorisalone was already well established. The brand is just a frame set up “ex post” succeeding processes that have followed other paths, a label that does not seem to have played a role in the "hard" transformation process. It is worth noting, however, that it has been useful for the actors, firms and entrepreneurs present in Brera to connect themselves to this brand (being and communicating that even Brera is a “design district”), practising a sort of selfrecognition as a geographical area, and making a kind of communication "alignment" to other zones. c. Feeble attempts In other situations this relationship between hard transformations that can attract the concentration of similar functions and making a new brand for the area is struggling to foster synergies or to have "success" from the point of view of the construction of new urban imagery. It happens for several reasons: because the transformations are recent and therefore not yet ripe, and because of the lower number of transformation areas involved in the processes. One of the strengths of the cases mentioned above was precisely the fact that they are placed in partially peripheral urban sectors but with a great potential for transformation, which was subsequently recognized by other operators who decided to invest there creating these sort of “urban creative concentrations”.

The areas close to via Mecenate in the east part of the city, or the areas close to the Fabbrica del Vapore in the west part are both examples of situations where some interesting “hard” transformations happened (done by private investors in the first case and by the municipality in the second one), followed by equally interesting attempts to build a territorial brands. However, they still struggle to take root or to go beyond inefficient communication projects. Branding strategies arrived after the physical transformations of some specific ex industrial buildings, being clearly inspired by models that have been successful elsewhere. But here, at the moment, they still are isolated episodes, and the branding attempts to promote a new image of the area seems ineffective. d. Anticipation Another mode is the one that we can finally recognize in Porta Romana. Here we find an urban environment in which various transformations of former industrial buildings have taken place over the years. The interventions are characterized by the presence of activities related mainly to fashion (which has a traditionally different impact on the city, compared to design). The interventions on ex industrial buildings are strongly introverted as the Foundation Prada, Etro, etc. (Botti, 2012) and often are not able to change the nature of public space out of the period of events. The attempt of Fuorisalone to establish a Zona Porta Romana appears in this case as a weak attempt to create a network of some functions already present in a neighbourhood not well characterized by the presence of design related activities. In these cases the promotional dimension looks like an attempt of anticipation of possible uses, with the belief to make more evident some potentialities not yet taken.

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Final remarks and research agenda The relationships between urban marketing strategies related to the events of the Fuorisalone and the way in which the areas in Milan mentioned above have been transformed in spaces and uses over the last 30 years are different and allow us to suppose different roles of branding strategies, "behind" and "beyond" the physical transformation of the city entertaining relationships of mutual influence, indifference, or attempts to trigger a new imagination with different levels of effectiveness.

In the more consolidated cases (Tortona, Ventura and Brera) where the number of visitors during the Design Week is high and the image promoted by branding strategies in the common discourse (and in tourist guides) is established, the relationship is, in the first case, of synergy with the transformations in progress, playing an active role in having fuelled the process of “creative urban concentration”; in the second case, the relationship is of confirming an already established identity and little is added to on going urban transformation processes related to the physical dimension of buildings. In the cases that are still under development, the deployment of branding strategies appear not entirely successful to entrench new "vocations" in urban imagination, fuelling new images of the district. Firstly, they start from individual buildings and venues of creative activities that are still quite isolated, and secondly because they try to build networks between functions in the hope that branding can work as an engine for further transformations.

It is worth repeating that the case of building the brand of Zona Tortona in Milan has worked as a model to be replicated and that others have taken it as a reference.

Despite the differences of location and situation, what is common to all these cases, however, although the role and the position is different in the process, is the need for self-recognition - expressed by actors - of a synthetic label capable of conveying the name within certain circuits. By shifting the emphasis not only from activities to the districts -allowing different and complementary functions like shops, restaurants or houses to adapt themselves to the dominant image promoted - but also by moving from an image that covers the entire city (Bruzzese 2004) to a more localized one, involving specific areas and by adopting new promotional languages. Brands are "situated", linked to a network of streets that identifies neighbourhoods or “zones”.

The role of these promotional strategies is certainly linked to the Fuorisalone and to a set of initiatives that have made some parts of the city the stage and/or the showcase of different events. In the last 15 years of the Fuorisalone, exponential success and growth have occurred, amplifying not only the activities promoted but also the places where these events take place. To some extent, these activities and new uses have also changed the geography of urban centres albeit temporarily.

This indeed fuels the difference between the ordinary city of daily life and the extraordinary city, the one of events. As known, the images promoted by branding strategies help to build those that 15 years ago Giuseppe Dematteis (1995) called "external images", directed not so much to those who live in places but rather those who use them for different reasons. The relationship between external and internal images, between the ordinary and extraordinary city, and the coexistence of these two often-conflicting dimensions still remains an open problem.

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Railway station and urban transition in China Zhen Chen

Politecnico di Milano E-mail: zhen.chen@polimi.it

China is an outstanding example to focus the relationship between railway station and urban transition.

My paper shall start considering the railway development at the turn of the 20th century, which radically changed the pre-existing territorial hierarchy in the regions concerned, implying the foundation of new cities, or a fast-paced development of existing ones. After the colonization period, the communist regime changed the location of original station, or build new station to integrate with new civic center, thus created an unified urban image and model for Chinese cities. At present China is facing her ‘golden age’ of high speed rail, the network and stations play again a critical role in shaping of the future cities.

My paper shall conclude considering some analogies and distinctions between the present time and the 20th century’s Chinese railway station and urban transition.

Keywords: Architecture, railway station, China, urban transition.

1. Introduction China is an outstanding example to interpret the relationship between railway station and urban transition.

To discuss the changing urban language in Chinese cities in the past century and nowadays, railway station is a not to be missed protagonist.

The early railway development which was built by foreign forces at the end of 19 century and the beginning of 20 century, radically changed the pre-existing territorial hierarchy in the regions concerned, implying the foundation of new cities, or a fast-paced development of existing ones. Some foreign countries set up railway companies to plan and establish the new city/district by using the same urban language, for instance, Russia in Harbin and Dalian, Japan in Shenyang, Changchun, Fushun, and Jiamusi.

After the colonization period, the communist regime changed the location of original station, or build new station to integrate with new civic center, thus created an unified urban image and model for some Chinese capital cities. While this urban language can be also trace to 1920s, when the Nationalist government made the Capital Plan in Nanjing; and even nowadays, in Shenzhen Central the station is set underground and integrated with the municipal government; the long promenade which links stations and surrounding facilities in Shenzhen North and Guangzhou South helps to establish a new civic center for the new urban district.

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Nowadays the boom of HSR (High Speed Railway) construction in China is an exciting event and process that never happened before in this planet. The HSR network changes the travel time between big cities with long distance and cities in the same metropolitan area, which enhances the regional structure and relations of cities. Moreover, the stations play again a critical role in shaping of the future cities. Some stations help to create a double city which remind us what happened nearly one century ago in some colonial cities. Even the stations themselves represent the architectural concept of new generation.

Considering some analogies and distinctions between the present time and the 20th century, this paper summarizes the relation between railway station and urban transition in China by inducing and categorizing the various phenomena.

2. Station and the foundation of city Until the end of the nineteenth century, Harbin was a ferry on the Sungari River near to some scattered villages.

In 1898, the Russian company CER (Chinese Eastern Railway) started to construct the railway junction in Harbin, as an interchange point between the Trans-Manchurian line (“Chita -Vladivostok� shortcut of Trans-Siberian Railway) and the new railway connection to the port cites of Dalian and Lushun in Bohai gulf. CER immediately took the form not only as a railway company but also, and especially, as "enterprise of urban and regional planning."

Figure 1. The Dalian station (CER architect, 1899) and Harbin station (Zhitkovich, 1903) with the urban form during the foundation period of two cities

The urban layout is divided by the railway lines into a series of geographically, functionally and "ethnically" distinct neighborhoods: Pristan, the district between the river port and the central station was set up as railway factories, in front of which were residential area predominantly inhabited by Westerners, with dwelling houses and commercial building, characterized by dense blocks and buildings of 4-5 floors designed for business people from the international community (Russians, Polish, Jews and Japanese, etc); in Fujiadian, under the administration of the Chinese government, building characters appeared similar to those of Pristan; in Novij Gorod (New Town), based on two main axes (on the head of one was central station) with a central circular plaza and the cathedral St. Nicholas in the intersection, the major roads were constellated with elegant "modern" style cottages: here, were located the headquarters of CER, major

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cultural, administrative, religious institutions and commercial centers of the city, whose economic vitality and elegant buildings made the reputation of the city as the "the East Paris".

The same layout of New town also appeared in Dalian which was also planned by Russians, from the station square extended the “station street” to the main church - the geographic center of the city.

Another main street, formed intersection of the church and square, linked the sea port on one end, and shopping center on the other end.

Harbin was born by the train. Thanks to the railway, the city had a rapid development and the population exceeded 500,000 in 1934, of which approximately 160,000 came from 33 different countries. Harbin was one of the most important financial centers of north-east Asia at the beginning of the twentieth century.

3. Double city During both of the early railway and nowadays HSR construction periods we have observed some cities double themselves thanks to the railway station.

Japanese in Manchuria About one century ago, during the foreign force occupation period, the Japanese in Manchuria and German in Jinan built railway station far to ancient Chinese city, and using it as a center to organize new colonial city. In this process, the station was like a bridgehead that brought into the new city.

In some cities of Manchuria (Shenyang, Changchun, Fushun, Jiamusi), the new city reflected a similar model based on a rectangular area with the longer side parallel to the railway line, divided in regular blocks by a network of orthogonal roads, crossed by a trident axes originated from the rectangular station square.

In the case of Shenyang the new city was nearly two kilometers far from the ancient Chinese walled city.

Figure 2. The Shenyang double city and stations (Japanese station of South Manchuria Railway, Yasushi Tatakeshi e Soutarou Yoshida, 1909; Chinese station of Beijing-Shenyang Railway, Yang Tingbao,1927), and other three Manchurian double cities planned during Japanese occupation - Fushun (1924), Changchun (1932), Jiamusi (1937)

The main offices, administration buildings and hotels were located in the rectangular station square, along the main streets and around the other two “circus”. The station was located exactly in the intersection point of the trident, with a dome set in the middle, and was visible from all the avenues of the three axes.

In the new city, the colonizers built many public buildings, like office, hotel, bank, hospital, school, etc, using the typology of western architecture. The western architectural typologies, different architectural volumes and city images in the new city formed a distinct atmosphere from the original Chinese city.

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With the support of the efficient railway transport, the modern industry and commerce developed rapidly.

The new coming migrations grew fast and soon helped to double the original city.

German in Jinan The same story happened in the German-influenced city Jinan too. After the Qingdao-Jinan railway (In 1897, German occupied Qingdao, a beautiful fishing village of Shandong Peninsula, and started to construct a new port city. In order to strengthen the control of the rich Shandong province, they began to build the Qingdao-Jinan railway in 1901) was completed in 1904, the Chinese Qing government took the initiative to open a commercial port area to the west of the ancient city, south of the station. This area covered about two square kilometers and had a grid road network. The dense road network spawned many street shops, western consulates, churches, banks, housing, hospitals and other large occident-style buildings. Independently of the ancient city, at the beginning this isolated area had only two roads to connect with the original one.

Figure 3. The Shenyang double city and stations - Station of Tianjin-Pukou Railway (H. Fischer, 1908), station of Qingdao-Jinan Railway (1914)

In 1912, the Tianjin-Nanjing Railway (The Tianjin-Nanjing Railway crossed the Yellow River in the north of Jinan. From Tianjin the railway could extend to Beijing or Manchurian cities, and reach shanghai from Nanjing) was completed, and a railway station was also established in the foreign settlement area. Jinan had since become an important transportation hub of east China north-south railway, linking Beijing northward, Shanghai southward, and the Qingdao seaport to the east. Soon, modern industrial and commercial businesses developed rapidly; the population of settlement grew fast and this new district of

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settlement expanded outward. In this case, we also realized the very important role of station, as a machine to create the new city and thus double the original city.

4. Cities with HSR Stations Nowadays, the huge national HSR network underway in China comes along with the rising phenomenon of high speed urbanization, started some 30 years ago. From 1996 until now, and probably also for the next 20 years, urban population grew at a 20 millions per year rate, mainly nurtured by rural exodus. Many cities proposed new master plans to settle the new residents. HSR is a kind of infrastructure that could create a much closer relation between cities, and attract capital, business, labor, commerce, etc. Bearing some analogies with the early 20th century’s Chinese urban development, the present HSR network’s development and its stations play again a critical role in the shaping of Chinese cities.

In some Chinese cities such as Dezhou, Xinyang, Yangzhou, the chosen location for the new stations shows the ambitious and exciting vision of these cities’ urban development. Many HSR stations were built in the suburb far away from the city center. Although it due to some factors include the requirement of enough semi diameter of curve for high speed train, or the reduction of the relocation compensation for the former inhabitants, but the most important reason is that the local governments are eager for a new master plan to develop a new city with the huge opportunity offered by the HSR project.

These stations, certainly related to other transportation means, form integrated urban transportation hubs and drive the development of new city. At the same time, the existing city can maintain its present activities, and the old railway station is dedicated to passenger transportation at the regional scale and to freight traffic.

Combined to the recent urban master plans, the HSR stations could foster the development of the new territory, to double the city: like one century ago happened in Shenyang and Jinan, the railway station nowadays is still a catalyst for urban civilization.

Figure 4. The Dezhou double city and new HSR station area (Atkins, 2011)

5. Station and Civic center Chinese ancient cities constructed usually following the Chinese traditional planning theory. City had square shape with one or three gates opened on each side. The streets connecting the gates were mainly the main road, thus creating a layout of grid street network. After the demolition of the walls, the city gates and the sense of ceremony of entering city through gate disappeared too. While Station locates at one end of the main street that assumes in a certain sense the role of city’s entrance. This street, usually acts as the principal axis and one instrument to lead the city, along with the most magnificent public buildings on both sides.

Passengers get out of station and instantly see the most spectacular street. The case of Henry Murphy’s project of Central Administrative District and station in 1930 shows how this American architect tried to

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design not only an adaptive architecture but also an adaptive plan. Chinese Architect Liang Sicheng also proposed, in early 1950, the New Beijing Station to build “in Yongdingmen gate (the South gate of outer city wall/end of the central axis) area, to let passengers experience the splendor of Beijing axis soon after they get out of the station”.

The new Communist regime, who claimed to be independent, in order to thoroughly eliminate the memory of the humiliate experience during colonial times, moved the legation area out of the Zhengyangmen (the South gate of the inner city wall) area, where two colonizers-constructed stations were set like a pair of pliers to hold the Zhengyangmen city gate and its barbican, as a symbol and metaphor for the control of Chinese feudal court by the foreign forces. In 1959, the new Beijing Central Station built near the east end of Chang'an Avenue, the new East-West axis, as the "First Street" of China, along which there were most important public buildings, where became a political and cultural center in Beijing, and strengthened the new urban image of the new regime.

Subsequently, Taiyuan Station with Yingze Avenue, and Changsha Station with First May Avenue were built during the 1960s to 1980s by using the prototype of the Beijing station and the Chang’an avenue.

The concept of Beijing cases eventually developed when the West station was built up in 1996 towards the westward extension of Chang’an avenue.

This urban language was represented in these capital cities by a typical model that the railway station acted as an important participant to form a civic center.

Figure 5. Central station (Henry Murphy, 1930) and Central Administrative District in Nanjing Capital Plan

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Figure 6. Beijing Central station (Yang Tingbao, 1959), West station (Zhu Jialu, 1996) and Changan Avenue. Taiyuan station (Shanxi architecture design institute, 1975) and Yingze Avenue

6. HSR and metropolitan area The opening of Qinghai-Tibet railway in 2006 was a symbol of the preliminary completion of national railway network. The total railway length developed from 21,000 km (1949) to 75,000 km (2006). Since 2004, China has formulated a “long-term railway network plan� to continue to supplement the ordinary railways, vigorously to build new high-speed railways (passengers dedicated lines), and the intercity high speed railways in important metropolitan areas.

We can not ignore the tremendous figures of the recent railway construction achievement and the future project: 378 new stations realized during the year 2006-2012; another about 400 new stations will be constructed until 2015. By the end of 2015, the high speed railway will reach 40,000 km (total national railway 120,000 km), in that moment it is expected to have more high-speed railway track than in all the rest of the world.

The HSR network efficiently linked the megacities with long distance and also those in the same metropolitan area, that enhances the regional structure and relations of these cities.

On the one hand, the HSR network changes the travel time between the megacities with long distance. A famous example is the Beijing-Shanghai HSR which has already completed in 2011, each day operates 90 pairs (two services: 65 pairs of 300 km/h, and 27 pairs of 250 km/h) of high-speed trains , and offers extra trains during Spring Festival travel season. The total length of it is 1318 km, the fastest just need 4 hour 48 minutes. More and more people choose train to travel between Beijing and Shanghai. For instance, the fastest train to connect Beijing and Nanjing (1023 km) costing 3 hours 39 minutes, it is no reason to take plane any more that the custom of passengers greatly changed.

On the other hand, in Pearl River Delta, Yangtze River Delta, and Beijing-Tianjin Megalopolitan area, HSR system is used to connect cities - almost like a fast subway.

The system was constituted by two kinds of HSR - one is the long-distance national arteries, the other is the intercity lines.

For instance, the Beijing-Shanghai HSR offers the service of Nanjing-Shanghai (301km) with a smallest travel time of 69 minutes without stops, and also the service to stop in the cities between Nanjing and Shanghai with no more than two hours. While the Nanjing-Shanghai intercity HSR, operated in a separate HSR line, also offers services of Nanjing-Shanghai with direct express, or usually more stops within two hours. They are operated by two different companies and in a certain sense are competitors. The 146 pairs

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of high-speed trains of these two companies move 170,000 passengers per day, with a minimum interval of five minutes - like the urban metro service.

The same realities we could also notice in the Beijing-Tianjin and Pearl River Delta metropolitan areas.

Therefore, nowadays the megacities of these three metropolitan areas in China, where cover more than 100 million inhabitants, become closer and closer.

Besides these two system which belongs to the national railway corporation, in fact there is the third level of rail infrastructure which belongs to the cities: the metro system acts also for the exchange between the railway stations and the urban areas.

Figure 7. The main infrastructure of Pearl River Delta

HSR station and cities When focus to the relation between new HSR stations and the city, we notice the new station revolution is that they mainly contribute themselves as a piece to the natural or urban landscape.

What we can assume is that these HSR stations are reflecting the new task and trend by their places and characters in the urban scene. Although we can find some stations like “flying disc” or “starship” still show the aspect of form to demonstrate power, but the general tendency is not to emphasis themselves at all. Especially if we consider the Hong Kong West Kowloon and Tianjin Yujiapu cases, the stations seem to be a geographic metaphor, as a sort of hill and park mixed with urban landscape. The Shenzhen north station and Huiyang station have one side facing to the city, and the other side is the conclusion of the continuity of the landscape of a park.

The function of the concourse of Tianjin west station also seems to be an urban gallery to connect the two part of the city - the downtown and a new urban center. Station is not anymore in his own emphasis, but is a part of making the urban structure – reminding the idea of galleries in Europe which were largely used as a way to create a new kind of buildings associated with urban blocks. Citizens were invited to pass through the station even do not “hear the sound of the train”.

Therefore, the tendency of stations nowadays is to make station as a part of landscape, could be a natural landscape, and also be a mega structure of urban landscape.

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Figure 8. Hong Kong West Kowloon terminus (Aedas, 2009-2015) and Tianjin Yujiapu station (SOM, 2011-2014)

Figure 9. Tianjin West station (GMP, 2005-2011)

7. Conclusion From the different topics we can summarize the role of stations in the cities. In the case of the colonial times, like Harbin, Dalian, Shijiazhuang, Shenyang, Jinan, the new stations helps to found or double the cities. The stations were profoundly involved in the specific urban layouts. While as soon as the People’s Republic of China was founded, the remove of the old stations and the construction of the new one which involved in the development of the new urban axis shows a strong image of civic center and reflects the symbol of the political power.

In the recent cases, the HSR stations still create, or participate to form, the new civic centers, but with less political factors, to integrate with the axis or group of cultural, commercial and entertainment facilities. In the case of Shenzhen North and Guangzhou South the long promenade axis combines with the multilayer commercial structures; the Hong Kong West Kowloon terminus and Tianjin Yujiapu station as a civic square and park integrate with the nearby cultural and commercial areas. So that the stations are as a piece of the natural or urban landscape.

Like the stations in past times, nowadays they change the cities as a critical element to participate in forming the new urban language of the future.

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Figure 10. Guangzhou South station (Terry Farrel, 2004-2010) and the long promenade

Figure 11. Shenzhen North station (China Railway Fourth Survey and Design Group Co.,Ltd., The institute of Architecture Design & Research of Shenzhen University, 2007-2011) and the promenade to connect the surrounding future facilities

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Figure 12. Hong Kong West Kowloon terminus (Aedas, 2009-2015) and the surrounding facilities

References Akira Koshizawa, (1986), translated by Huang Shyh-Meng, History of urban planning in Manchuria, Dajia publishing house, Taipei.

Peter G. Rowe, (2005), East Asia Modern: Shaping the Contemporary City, Reaktion Books, London.

Technical office of Capital plan, (2006), capital plan (1929), Nanjing publishing house, Nanjing.

W.Cody Jeffrey, (2001), Building in China: Henry K. Murphy's "Adaptive Architecture", 1914-1935. Chinese University Press. Hong Kong.

Zheng Jian, (Chief Editor, 2006-2009), Design Collection of Railway Station, Vol.1-7, China Railway Publishing House, Beijing.

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Memory of the space A cognitive way of thinking G.M.A. Balayet Hossain Politecnico di Milano DAStU - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies E-mail: gm.hossain@polimi.it

If we trough a stone in a small pond it makes waves. And few minutes later it disappears. For the reason behind that, waves of the puddle have a transient character. In some extend our field of vision is like a wave of transient character and our vision of eye is like a stone which senses the space by producing a transient effect in our mind-set, later it transformed as a memory or smash. There are different eccentric of spaces around us, are converted into multi scale of identity by the human engagements with spaces.

Subsequently, our transient mind always is exploring spaces by means of building memory with a nature and an art entity in our built environment. This paper reveals the space, memory and time as a connection of spatial structure in our built environment. And there impacts on our transient life by means of space. It is also convened the knowledge of Image, Memory and Place cannot be understood without the echoes of living being and their everyday life.

Keywords: Life, Memory and Space

1. Introduction City is a constructed space and it is constructed in space. Its growth and extension depends on the behavior of spaces. Therefore the character of a city could be defined its identity and meaning of spaces.

Spaces of a city are a field of visual waves where it has a harmony character and develop common places of memory. We are directly or indirectly linked with those common places of memories. We are not only the observer but also part of those common places and our echoes with those memories draw out the images of those spaces in our virtual mind. According to Kevin lynch those memories are inter-related with different elements of city where legibility, structure, identity and imageability are major key issues for understanding city and its milieu (Lynch, K., 1960). Those characters help to create mental images if those elements of the city are spatially well connected and make integrity as a whole city. Memory in a sense is a series of images and those images are fitted into our virtual mind of expression. On the other hand memories of identical spaces make everyday lives meaningful and directional by the spatial dimensions of spaces (Ardakani, M. K., and Oloonabadi, S. S., 2011). Therefore those imageable identical spaces have an impact on spatial structure for a relationship with city and its citizens. Afterward those spaces are become

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a place of identity from local to global through social, cultural, economical to political background.

Understanding of a city and its structure at this moment in contemporary time is contingent on mass population and economic power of growth. And these are becoming a foremost singularity to rethink city’s images and its agglomeration as an old but new phenomenon in the contemporary cities. Past and present memory of identical space is fallen into a new challenge of transformation regarding the actual meaning of space and city images through structural links. Life and its pattern is transforming too much in the contemporary stages. However in the pressure of complexity of a contemporary situation is becoming a more important to re-look and reveal the significant images from the complexity by respecting the past memory of its exiting spaces. The city like Venice has a significant character of cityscape which is successfully linked with its water structure and city life (Cohen N., 1999). But the idea of a theoretical city is far beyond in a contemporary thinking of a city which are transforming city as a text for making it more moveable rather than the meaning of life and space. Nevertheless the mobility of a city is “The relationships between the direction of a walk (…) and the meaning of wards (…) situate two sorts of apparently contrary movements, one extrovert (to walk is to go outside), the other introvert (a mobility under the stability of the signifier)” (Certeau M., 1984). Therefore the articulation of the spatial pattern of space in a city is coinciding by the signifier which has a semantic appeal to the every footstep of its inhabitants (Barthes, R., 2000). Consequently meeting with the significant spaces is a process to find out the meaning of life by reflecting their imaginary with habituated spaces. Moving through the city is an experience which assists the citizens to read the language of the city by its art effects and reflections of images as a signifier of the spaces through creating memories in our everyday life. A great city is a linked city considering our common places of life, which built a good memory with its surface of art, architecture and landscape, where life is a moving elements and observer. In some extent those stationary of the city is telling us the life of our past movement. Bring out the past time of history from signifier of the spaces is depending on the link to observer which make a spatial memory, according to Michel De Certeau that it is generated from our everyday travelling, in addition all spatial memories are the 'travel mamories' and spaces are the responsible which contains the way of our daily activities. Conversely, city images could be distinguished by the flow of spaces where their memories of perspectives are illustrated in the way of their past times. In this research paper, it is to be discussed in a qualitative way that what makes better and create our mental images in our built environment - regarding the past history of a city Dhaka. And is there any significant rapport within spatial structure and city images from the history to till now?

2. Chronological Growth and movement Dhaka city is now carrying out a long glorious past history from the 7th century when the name of the city was not derived and from that period this region was began to civilize with human settlement by the power of secularism. Historically the spatial settlement of this small area had been spread out with cultural shape of civilization and spatial movement from the early Premughal and British colonial period.

Sequentially this region was diversely populated and popular for its variety of commodities, fertile land and access through water; after that it became a resort of various European powers- Portuguese, Dutch, British, and other foreign merchants, traders and bankers -Armenians, Pathans, Turanis and Marwaris came to Dhaka. During those historical movements, the eminence power of edifices' through land involvement with political power and resources also raised the city as a profusion of wealth which format this land of settlement as a leading capital city in the past era to till now (Habib, K., 2010). Furthermore the political movement of this settlement progress was highly engrossed and promoted by its hydrological and geographical position. Topologically, the growth of this city is originated and directed by the sustenance of the river Buriganga. And tremendous endowment of Buriganga, gave access in this region to build its history, culture, economy and identity. During that period, water transport thru this organism of this city became a vital part of the city life and this significant character had great impact to make a provision route to raise the city and its image to tie with other provinces. Water and the past memory of the settlement are clearly drawn 'Dhaka waterfront' with the character of different edifices like Bara Katra, Ahsan Manzil and Mosques etc. along the river bank Buriganga which were all the core edifices of

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the Mughal period. Thus the city and its hydrological engagement with edifices made a pivotal role in the traditional to industrial movement of this region. Urban historian Eamonn Canniffe in his book ‘Urban Ethic’ addressed that the changes and continuities of urban life are connected in some extends with the element of water (Canniffe, E., 2006). In the traditional city the provision of water, scarcity and preciousness became the strategic subject of self-conscious celebration and life-sustaining frameworks of inspiration with divine character. The animation of civic realm and social systems were supported by the animation of water and its necessities for life. The liberal arts associated with water and its activities in the daily intellectual life, sculptural figure with fountain all predicted the mythical, religious and political reign of expression. Similarly in the eye of medieval period, the sacred character of water had been measured as a symbol of city’s survival. He also reasonably argued that “… in the eighteenth century when industrialization initiates profound urban changes, water has an enhanced role, as a source of power for mechanization, as means of transport through the construction of canals, and as the site of pollution and diseases” (Canniffe, E., 2006). Afterward this ®evolution abused the environment very rapidly which characterized the traditional city to industrial city. In effect, one of the most essential objects of this city Dhaka was its hydrological Structure, which had a great impact in its spatial historical movement of sequential development. It is mentionable that in the Premughal time the periphery of the entire settlement in this region was surrounded by the water body and this hydrological structural ring around the settlements was the branch of the river Buriganga. Later this character of hydrological structure and spatial pattern of the city had been transformed chronologically and in the period of Bangladesh this hydrological loop was totally lost. The fluctuation character of the ‘Buriganga’ in the south which was origin of the city, built many landmasses thorough in its hydrological systems, which were chronologically transformed and added to the main body of the city floor around the river edges. In addition morphologically growth of the city and its orientation from Premughal to Bangladesh period were subjected by its hydrological order, where the city floor was expanding towards the river side. And this waterfront settlement from the Premughal to British colonial period was extended slightly north-east vertical direction, but significantly its move and extended horizontally west direction along the river bank.

And therefore chronological development during this period could be considered as counter clockwise evaluation movement which growth was almost parallel to the river belt of the Buriganga. The depth of this growth was 3 km along the river and it was transformed towards west direction three times (each fold 2km) until colonial age. After the partition of Bengal division (1947) Dhaka city began to develop rapidly towards its north periphery, where the growth of this city floor could be considered as a clockwise evaluation movement. In this evaluation process north peripheral growth of the city found quite far relationship with its origin and movement like the character of sprawl. And sequentially this city was adapted into the colonial and post-colonial period of settlements thru always clutching new territory by giving a new dimension of city floor. But the indigenous patterns of historic structures and its significant edifices were played continuously pivotal role for growing and imaging this city with its water accesses from the Premughal period.

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Figure 1. Hydrological condition and chronological growth of the city 'Dhaka'

3. City’s engagement and evaluation Water and its engagement with traditional Dhaka city were rooted historically as a main spine of the city structure where it was connected all most all parameter of city’s life and activities. From the very beginning it was working as an entrance point of this traditional city. Besides transport and trade thru water infrastructure; the river ‘Buriganga’ was also a symbol of cultural and heritage reason for hindu celebration, cultural boat sailing, fishing, boat racing and so on. It is also mentionable that most of the leading historical edifices were erected beside this river bank. In some extend those edifices were reigned us politically or religiously in the past history. Ahsan Manzil is one of the evidence which is still standing along the river bank as an identity of traditional city which now became a symbol of our heritage and cultural identity. Ahsan Manzil commonly known as official residential palace and seat of the ‘Dhaka Nawab Family'. It is a magnificent indo-saracenic revival architectural edifice which was wonderfully coupled with water of the river Buriganga from its past decades at Kumartoli in the south historical part of Dhaka. Comparatively, the Basilica of St Mary of Health commonly known as the Salute, also stands on a narrow finger of land between the Grand Canal and the Bacino di San Marco making the church visible when entering the Piazza San Marco from the water. Both examples are harmonized of our bright past history thru the flow of water. Nevertheless the city Bath on the curve of the river Avon and the distant panoramic view of the river Forth from the city Edinburgh all possess historic cities as a sense of place and physical identity (Rodwell, D., 2007). However the contemporary city Dhaka and its imageability are now distinctly divided into two identical images by two different characters of edifices. One of them is above mentioned ‘Ahsan Manzil’ (type A) in the traditional city. And another one is the house of parliament locally known as Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (type B) is now leading the contemporary image of the city. Equally memories of citizens are widely linked with those two distinct types of images in their everyday life and activities. Now Ahsan Manzil is representing the traditional history of the city, life and its vibrant culture. On the other hand Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban designed by Architect Louis I. Kahn is

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another successful image for the new part of the city which emerged during the period of Bangladesh.

This modern edifice became a contemporary identity, where it was based on the traditional history, culture and social movement.

Figure 1. Ahsan Manzil, Dhaka (1869) and Basilica di Santa Maria, Venice (1687)

Figure 2. Cityscape A. Ahsan Manzil (1872) and B. Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban (1980)

In favor of evaluating those two different type of images and their legibility with spatial structure should be consider for illustrating their meaning to the people. Lynch in his book ‘The image of the City’ clearly mentioned that environmental image could be analyzed into three components in an abstract way [1].

To understand the quality of environmental images, following three key points could be consider for examining above two types of built spaces: • About the ‘identity’ where it was meant the distinct character from other things with recognizable entity or individuality; • then secondly the image must be linked with (structure) spatial or pattern relation of the object to the observer or other objects; • and finally the object must have some ‘meaning’ for the observer where it is a resource of a relation but different than spatial or pattern relation.

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Figure 3. Spatial positions of type A and B

Concerning above components into the type A and B in the following table, we could come out with a comparative result of their environmental images. And those components could be achieved only if all three aspects are taken into account together.

Type

Edifices

Meaning

Identity

Structural link

Environmental Image

A

Ahsan Manzil

!

!

"

=1

B

Jatiyo Sangshad Bhaban

!

!

!

=0

City image = A + B = 1 Table 1. Credibility of two environmental images

In the type A, we see the result of the image is scored by '1' which means type A has one lacking to complete its imageability. One the other hand type B is scored by '0' what it means it has no lacking of any components to complete its imageability. But in the correlation of type A and B is also scored '1' which indicates the overall city image (A+B) has one lacking to complete the total representation of the city Dhaka.

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Figure 4. Areal view of type A and B

Type A historically established at the entrance point of old Dhaka and it was became a power of cultural, political and social identity of the traditional city. It is now preserved and transformed into a museum. But the rapid growth of the market oriented traditional city seized its legibility from structural point of view.

And the relationships with its river now become more vulnerable from its citizens because it does not make any visual language with them. Even there are no spaces around it for public or traditional cultural activities. In a word the image of this traditional identity is day by day sinking into a mass concrete around it by cutting its magnificent relationship with water. And now this traditional city is losing its past attractions.

Type B on the other hand translated traditional culture very critically and philosophical way by linking with the superlative character of water which has the spirit of the traditional city within a city. Reimaging our traditional city web with scenic elements confer this whole complex a significant character of identity for the new part of the city in an abstract way to recall our past memory. Spaces around it make clear structural legibility and where its linked memory is mentally linked with every age of people and their activities around the city.

4. Conclusion Cognitive images and its reflection in our everyday activity, depends on the process of widely biological and spatial link of our built environment. "Elements such as water, shores, river banks, are not to be lost in our present endeavor to maintain cities. A city will always have elements of nature to keep and relate to" [8]. From the above examination and exploration, unwanted building construction, boat terminal, heavy vegetation which is seized the visibility of Ahsan Manzil from the bank of river Buriganga, could be transformed into a public place for increasing its spatial relationship under the development of waterfront and urban conservation scheme. Also buildings heights should be regulated around this historical palace, so that it could be visually experienced with cityscape and spatially linked with its surrounding people and background environment. Expression of our human mind is actually experienced through the experience of physical environment. On the other hand, imageability of the space is inspiring and guiding us about the ethics and consequences of our everyday life. In the cotemporary period of movement our expectation from the spaces are more and that should be characterized with a degree of linkages in our everyday life with city images.

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References Ardakani, M. K., and Oloonabadi, S. S., (2011), Collective memory as an efficient agent in sustainable urban conservation, International Conference on Green Buildings and Sustainable Cities, Elsevier Ltd, Bologna, pp.985- 988.

Barthes, R., (2000), rethinking Architecture: a reader in cultural theory, Routledge, New York, pp. 165-167 Canniffe, E., (2006), Urban Ethic. Design in the contemporary city, Routledge, New York, p.37.

Certeau M., (1984), The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, California, pp.103-112 Cohen N., (1999), Urban Conservation, The MIT Press, Cambridge, p.64, 251-257, 281.

Habib, K., (2010), The Post Colonial Public Spaces and Cultural Diversity: The Case of National-Cultural Representative Public Spaces of Dhaka, Urban Knowledge & the Cities in the South, Proceedings of the XIth NAerus-conference, LaCambreHorta- ULB- ASRO-KULeuven, Brussels, pp. 469-481.

Lynch, K., (1960), The Image of the city, MIT Press, Cambridge, pp. 1-14.

Rodwell, D. (2007), Conservation and Sustainability in Historic Cities, Blackwell Publishing Ltd, Oxford, p.136.

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Urban transformations Ghetto of Rome in the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century Elisabetta Liumbruno Università di Roma La Sapienza Dipartimento di Storia, Disegno e Restauro dell’Architettura, E-mail: elisabetta.liumbruno@alice.it

The purpose of the research is to study a characteristic area of Rome, named Rione Sant’Angelo, where Ghetto was built in the XVI° Century. From XVI° to XX° Century, Ghetto was important for this place because the articulated urban fabric has linked points that became the most important spots also today, but, after the demolition of the walls of the Ghetto, lost their original function.

The urban projects, published after the 1870, proposed, in replacement of the “serraglio”, to build four block with Sinagoga which are totally out of the urban context nowadays.

Thanks to the researches that I have done through map collections, old illustrations and photos, historic books and a three-dimensional reconstruction, from which I have extracted important sections, I understand the urban quality and the life which was led in a little space like the Ghetto.

Keywords: development, demolition, reconstruction

1. Introduction Rione Sant'Angelo is the smallest among the Roman Rioni. It is located on the left bank of the Tevere in front of Isola Tiberina and is bordered to the west by Rione Regola, to the north by Rioni Sant’Eustachio e Pigna, east and south by Rione Campitelli and Rione Ripa.

This part of Rome was called Rione XI on May 18th, 1743 by Pope Benedetto XIV, but its history dates back to the time of Augusto, since in this area were built the Teatro di Balbo, the Circo Flaminio, the Portico di Ottavia and the Teatro di Marcello, which we can still admire. Therefore an important place since ancient times, that has been a landmark of the capital through the centuries.

During the sixteenth century the area comes back to be the center of Roman life and undergoes a new, decisive transformation when Pope Paolo IV, following the moves of the Patriarch of Venice, decided to build walls intended to confine the area inhabited by Romans Jews. Ghetto of Rome was born in 1555 because of this radical choice and according to the bolla "Cum Nimis Absurdum" (Milano A., 1964), from this moment on the structure of Rione will be divided more and more through small streets and large squares linking with accesses to "serraglio delli Ebrei".

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Figure 1: Rione Sant’Angelo and its location

These transformations helped to give life and character to one of the most popular Rione in Rome, although nowadays, the existing urban layout is barely comprehensible, having suffered major changes between the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. These changes are related both to hygienic reasons and ethical motivations - it was unacceptable the existence of a purpose-built “serraglio” for the Roman Jews. After the annexation of Rome to the Kingdom of Italy, in fact, with the new town planning, it was necessary to clean all areas affected by the floods of the Tevere, and, particularly, the buildings of Ghetto, which dipped really inside the waters of the river.

The implementation of the new Town Planning of 1888, caused the complete demolition of the whole Ghetto and the loss of characteristic streets as via delle Azimelle, vicolo del Pancotto, vicolo Capocciuto and the historical via Rua (Benedetti S. et al., 1989). They were replaced by two new roads that divided the area into four blocks, one of which was donated to the Jewish community for the construction of the synagogue, which was opened in 1914.

The Jewish carried on living in this neighborhood and in the surrounding areas, so that on January 16, 1943, in this same place, the German soldiers captured and transferred 1022 Jews to the concentration camp in Auschwitz.

2. The preliminary study The first approach to the study of the area of Ghetto was carried on through an inspection joined to a photographic collection that show particularly useful to understand the relationship between the remains of the old urban structure of Rione Sant'Angelo and the current status. The traces of the ancient structure are few, mainly related to pre-existing archaeological remains and hardly related to the current structure of the city; therefore it was required an historical and documental analysis to understand how this dynamic and densely populated neighborhood originally was. The study has been going on through the research of a current map, literary and iconographic sources, in addition it was necessary to develop the research about historic sources with the collection of pictures and ancient maps that could show in a clearly way the transformation of this part of the city and the life that was led into the small area also to understand the best methods of constructions and expansion over the centuries. This urban area has been a Ghetto for four centuries (from 1550 until the end of the nineteenth century), so we selected the most significant historical maps for each period, to show clearly the expansion of Ghetto through the centuries highlighting new doors and buildings.

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Among sixteenth century’s maps we chose the old maps of L. Bufalini (1551), M. Cartaro (1576), S. Du Perac (1577) e A. Tempesta (1593), among the seventeenth century’s those of G.B. Falda (1667) and G. De la Fuille (1691). The most useful maps of the eighteenth century are those of G.B. Nolli (1736-44) and G. Vasi (1781) while we selected the maps of L. Nisi Cavalieri (1863) and C. Scarpitti (1916) among those of the nineteenth and twentieth century.

Figure 2. 1551 – Rome of L. Bufalini Figure 3. 1576 – Rome of M. Cartaro

Figure 4. 1577 – Rome of S. Du Perac Figure 5. 1593 – Rome of A. Tempesta

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Figure 6. 1667 – Rome of G.B. Falda; Figure 7. 1691 – 1700 – Rome of G. De La Fuille

Figure 8. 1748 – Rome of G.B. Nolli; Figure 9. 1781 – Rome of G. Vasi

Figure 10. 1863 – Rome of L. Nisi Cavalieri; Figure 11. 1916 – Rome of C. Scarpitti

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The transition from the first maps showing the birth and development of the wall, to the final maps, makes us understand how the district’s structure undergoes to a radical and decisive change without leaving any trace of the previous structures. Rome over the centuries underwent major demolitions and new constructions left no trace of historical evidence but display the will to leave a strong imprint on the city. What is striking about the story of the Ghetto it’s not only the radical transformation of the urban area over the centuries, but the fact that this way of doing, that belong to the Renaissance and we might call “old”, is employed in recent times so as to leave photographic traces. The image of the area burned to the ground, recognizable only by the remains of the ancient city (Teatro di Marcello and Portico di Ottavia) and the course of the Tevere, dismays and calls to mind the desire to obscure a historical memory that could have been better expressed through the preservation and respect of a fragile old structure.

After selecting the engravings necessary to the study (Milano A., 1964), the next step was to identify the most important topographic points of the city that haven’t undergone radical changes over the centuries, so they are the fixed points of the urban history. These places are essential because can help the understanding of urban transformation. The first topographic points are those buildings constructed before "serraglio" as Colosseo, Pantheon, Campidoglio, Piazza Navona and Teatro di Marcello. The second point’s selection was inside the Rione and, after a careful study of its history, we chose Teatro di Marcello, Portico di Ottavia, Palazzo Mattei, Palazzo Costaguti, Palazzo Cenci and Isola Tiberina. Due to the practical need to compare the historical and contemporary maps we made two separated comparison researches in order to understand the elements that aren’t modified and the transformations of district.

We need to emphasize that the points inside the district are mainly sixteenth-century buildings located outside the Recinto of Ghetto; besides the shape of Isola Tiberina changes in all the historical maps, but its location is very important, since it is a point of reference of the area through the centuries.

The first comparison between the actual city and the 1551 map shows clearly that the urban structure is comparable with the contemporary city, indeed it seems that can be distinguished what would later become via dei Falegnami, via dei Funari e via del Portico di Ottavia. In seventeenth-century maps, as in the later ones, you can better notice the main squares (piazza Mattei, piazza Costaguti, piazza dei Cenci e piazza Campitelli) and the further streets that have played an important role in the history of the Recinto, as via della Reginella and via di Sant’Ambrogio.

Figure 12. comparison between Rione Sant’Angelo in 1551 and the current situation

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So the Recinto of Ghetto, is studied through its progressive planimetric development between Via dei Cenci and Teatro Marcello, in a second moment with the addition of the grounds along the bank of the Tevere and finally, with the purchase of the "braccio leoniano” (Benedetti S. et al. 1989). The extension of "serraglio", therefore, seems to proceed according to a gradual expansion of the borders, with the result of contracting the external space. When the planimetric expansion comes to end, contemporarily begins the height development, due to the increase of the resident population, caused by the emigration of Jews coming from the rest of Italy, who thought it was one of the most liberal Ghetto.

3. The historical reconstruction So it was possible to redraw the planimetric organization and then to begin an historical research of all key points of the area, in each map. Thanks to the sources found, it was possible to understand the development of roads, streets and buildings outside the Recinto and rebuild both the network, position and height of “serraglio’s” buildings. We noticed that the oldest street was via Rua, which linked the entry from piazza Giudea to the second door, located in the direction of Portico di Ottavia, and to the third door that opened into via di Ponte Quattro Capi ;!! !

Figure 13. analysis of the map of L. Bufalini

since 1600, after the annexation of lands on the bank of the Tevere allowed by Sisto V, was opened via Fiumara, which was important because it had the purpose of connecting two new accesses in the direction of via dei Cenci and the Ponte Fabricio.

From the analysis of the map of the eighteenth century it is clear that the road network become thicker in order to organize, in the better way, the internal connections, so via delle Azzimelle links via Rua with piazza delle Cinque Scole to the North side, vicolo Capocciuto and Via Catalana in the East, but, after crossing piazzetta delle Azimelle and piazzetta Catalana, it is possible to reach also via Fiumara located in the South of Ghetto. Furthermore from piazza Rua, situated in the North, walking through the street of the same name, we come to another important point of Ghetto that is piazza delle Tre Cannelle, which is a melting point of the three main streets: via Rua, via delle Azimelle and via Fiumara.

It is important focusing on the history of Piazza delle Cinque Scole, that gathered the five Jewish Schools: the Scola Nova, the Scola del Tempio, the Siciliana with Italian rite, the Castigliana with Spanish rite and the

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Catalana, the most important from architectural point of view, because it was built by Girolamo Rainaldi in 1628.

Outside the Recinto, piazza Giudea played an important role because it was the meeting point between Via di Sant'Ambrogio (which started from Piazza Mattei), via di Santa Maria del Pianto and via di Pescheria (which started from piazza di Pescheria); as well as, this square was important because it marked one of the historic entry to the Ghetto with also piazza di Pescheria, where was located the fish market.

Figure 14. analysis of the map of G.B. Falda

Figure 15. analysis of the map of G.B. Nolli

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The Jews were allowed to go to these places only in specific times, because their life inside the Recinto was limited by strict rules relating to both the hours of opening and closing of doors, at sunrise and sunset, and rules relating to signs of identification needed to be recognised when they crossed the doors of the Ghetto; moreover, the laws regulated the work that could be carried out by the Jews, in fact in the papal law was clear that they could not work in any commercial activity except selling rags and used clothing. Also, as it was written, they could not own any real estate, so they began to collect gold and money that could be lend to popes and anyone else (Milano A., 1964).

4. Reconstruction of the height development In order to better tell the story of this part of town it is necessary to find historical sources that allow us to suppose the heights of buildings (Bonaga E., Flammini M., 1975). For this reason it is needed to build the three-dimensional model to exctract significant sections necessary to understand the architecture of Ghetto comparing with the architectural and urban language of surrounding area. So, four sections were made: two transverse and two longitudinal following the development of the area that follow the course of the river. The first two were chosen in order to explain the expansion that arrive at the bank of the Tevere and the relationship with the Isola Tiberina, the other sections are useful to understand the progressive contraction of the surrounding neighborhood and the relationship with Teatro di Marcello and noble buildings. From the analysis of the sections is clear that the area, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, has a remarkable development in height, up to reach an average height of buildings to six floors.

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Figure 16. sections of the first Recinto of Ghetto and surrounding buildings

Figure 6. sections of the latest expansion of Ghetto and surrounding buildings

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Figure 7: demolition of Ghetto and building of Sinagoga

Figure 8. sections of Rione Sant’Angelo after demolition of Ghetto

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Figure 9: sections of Rione Sant’Angelo after reconstruction of four blocks

It is shocking the fact that the area, which is characterized by narrow streets and a particular development of the heights of its buildings, become, suddenly, an empty space, due to the total demolition of all buildings inside the Recinto, and ending with the twentieth-century reconstruction of four blocks including Tempio Nuovo.

It is indispensable to highlight that the reconstruction of the heights of the buildings means the possibility to make a little mistake because of the iconographic sources available to us until the nineteenth century: in fact the documents, that we can use to decide the height of each building, are books, or ancient “pseudo perspective” maps, that are often inexact and approximate.

The three-dimensional reconstruction has also an important purpose to make clear, through the rendering of its parts, the quality of life led into the high-rise, which didn’t allow the lighting of the streets below and the lower floors, and the poor condition of those who lived in homes built along the Tevere, almost inside its waters. The images extracted from the three-dimensional model were also used as "urban virtual construction site" with the purpose to show the expansion of this part of the city both in its planimetric development and in its significant transformations in height.

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Figure 10. 1551 - before building of Ghetto Figure 11. 1667 – Recinto of Ghetto with new lands along the banks of the Tevere

Figure 12. 1748 – Recinto del Ghetto and development of buildings Figure 13. 1863 – Recinto del Ghetto with new lands of “braccio leoniano”

Figure 14. 1889 – after demolition of Ghetto Figure 15. 1911 – after reconstruction of four blocks

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Finally three-dimensional parts of Ghetto, of which was present photographic sources, have been modeled in a well-defined way in order to get the feeling of deprivation related to the time of demolition, thus describing the relationship between heterogeneous parts of the same district and following rough destruction of which remains mark in urban and architectural heritage.

!!

Figure 16. late ‘800 – piazza delle Cinque Scole and its three-dimensional reconstruction

Figure 17. late ‘800 – via di Pescheria and its three-dimensional reconstruction

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Figure 18. late ‘800 – via Rua and its three-dimensional reconstruction

Figure 19. late ‘800 – buildings of Ghetto along the banks of Tevere, ponte Quattro Capi and three-dimensional reconstruction

!

Figure 20. late ‘800 – demolition of Ghetto Figure 21. early ‘900 – reconstruction of four blocks with Sinagoga

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In this way it is possible to analyze how over the years, after a gradual contraction and construction of the surrounding area, the complete destruction of the Ghetto created an empty space that can hardly be filled and, of course, the purpose has not been reached with the building of four new blocks that are clearly out of context.

The problem comes out because the Recinto has created a thick urban network so as to make some points such, as piazza Giudea, which was used, with also piazza di Pescheria, as a meeting and exchange point; also piazza delle Cinque Scole had a main role in the Jewish culture whereas up to now is used for a parking area. When these focus point were removed, there is no more the close link and the homogeneity inside the district, so nowadays people who goes through piazza Mattei is very confused, because they haven’t any reference point in the heart of the area.

The impression, about this situation, is going through an urban design, which is regulated by narrow streets that serve both the sixteenth-century palaces of noble families of the Rione Sant'Angelo and the poorest groups of buildings of different heights located one close to another, and then in another one characterized by big twentieth century buildings with a road system simple and rational.

The idea, that brought to the choice to cut so hardly into the urban area, hasn’t replaced the architectural language that connected the Ghetto to the rest of the city, but in this way it caused a deeper wound through the construction of the Sinagoga, in Art Nouveau style, and other twentieth-century buildings that are completely unable to create a coherent architectural link with the rest of the district.

References Benedetti S. et al., (1989), Recupero del Ghetto di Roma, Multigrafica Editrice, Roma Benedetti S. et al. (1989), Recupero del Ghetto di Roma, Multigrafica Editrice, Roma, pp. 23-26 Bonaga E., Flammini M., (1975), Il ghetto – struttura differenziata nel tessuto del centro storico di Roma, Edizioni Kappa, Roma Milano A., (1964), Il ghetto di Roma, Staderini Editore, Roma, p. 82.

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The retro-active effect of the cyberspace on physical space: the iper-dense city Debora Magri

Politecnico of Milano.

DAStU - Department of Architecture and Urban Studies E-mail: debora_magri@virgilio.it

The discovering of cyberspace, “spatial vision of the available information in global systems of processing data” (S. Tagliagambe), extends the possibilities of the design project not only in terms of instruments and methods, that is the capacity to produce images and “shape” of something that doesn’t exist yet, but also for the retro-active action on “effectual reality” which interacts and that is able to modify and enrich the real one. The progressive de-materialization of the inhabited places into liquid spaces doesn’t exclude, but supports the increase of density in physical spaces. The traditional urban forms, typical of the dense and compact cities of the past, don’t work anymore but establish the material and cultural structure for the regeneration of the inhabited spaces of the future city, an iper-dense system of places, of gathering, of movement and simultaneity.

Keywords: ciber-space, interaction, iper-dense city, open process, mutation

1. Introduction Plus les télescopes seront perfectionnés et plus il y aura d'étoiles.

Gustave Flaubert.

New media and technologies have changed our perception of space. Crisis of traditional reality doesn’t correspond to death of space but open a domain of new possibilities and opportunities to transform inhabited spaces. This paper, by proposing a series of questions, has not the ambition to give decisive responses, but aims to explore, facing new scientific and epistemological context, the possibilities of architecture, to create new contemporary places in existing cities, working in the interference between physical and virtual spaces and to respond to urgent and crucial issues globalization and recent phenomena have produced.

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2. Space as a cultural construction. Physical space vs ciber-space.

Grid and alphabet. Net and code. Two different ways of thinking space correspond to two different languages. The conception of space is strictly connected to the capability of men of “being able to see” that is “being able to read” (Tagliagambe S.,2005), so to communicate and to imagine, to represent and to invent. Space and language are products of human intelligence that generate structures to know, to transform, to inhabit world. Alphabet, as code, are technologies used to de-codify the complexity of phenomena, we call reality.

Derrick de Kerckhove gives an interesting interpretation of the evolution of the idea of space, enlightening a direct relation between alphabet and space. He recognizes in Ippodamo da Mileto the first who introduces a principle of rationality into the sign and informal space of ante-alphabet culture: the grid. It’s not a case that the conception of a rational and ordered space appeared in conjunction with the Greek literacy diffusion. This phenomena marks the passage from non-conscious processes to conscious processes2 of giving form to inhabited spaces, we call city. Roman castrum found its reason in a determined rational principle of occupying territories by imposing universal order and control. We can assert urban design originated from an alphabetic mind. A mind well exercised in the practice of reading, as action of de-codification, is disposed to activate the same process approaching the context, beyond the mere registration of data by physiological instruments of visions. Reading increases use of imagination because the reader has to translate words into images constructing its own reality in a space that we can call “mental space”. “A mind stimulated to analyse space could be inclined to organize it and to impose a rational grid in designing process. We can assert Ippodamo was an avid reader” (De Kerckhove D., 2001 p.10). Principles of architecture in “De re aedificatoria” reflect Vitruvius alphabetic mind as the Renaissance perspective can be defined as “the result of the analysis of the space in time, that is by distance” (Ibidem). Frontal relation with world characterizes the perception of space. Building is “read” by the façade, plaza is constructed as a sort of theatre “scene”. Distance separates subject from object. Point of view, the position in space of the observer, is crucial in the meaning of space and in its physical dimensions. It fixes ontological, physical and psychological position of man. Human eye becomes a sort of lens that separates the exterior world from the internal space of human mind. “Occidental mind works producing a sort of “upset perspective” (Ivi, p.16). The distinction between interior/exterior, object/subject, finds epistemological reasons in the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle that reflect on this topic constructing the basis of occidental culture.

Ciber-space upsets traditional idea of space3. The term, firstly used by William Gibson in Neuromance (1984), indicates a new kind of reality, an “iper-reality”, which pictures a “fantastic and artificial” world (in the meaning of out-of-reality) produced by new technologies. However in those years, all critical approach to ciber-space, while affirming an escape from reality, constantly refer their descriptions to precise urban context that are recognisable in their specific characters4. But the word “ciber”, whose etymon refers to the verb “to direct”, “to rule”, was used originally in English language to define a new cibernetic science, that is “the study of the control and the communication among living organisms and machines with the

2 3

4

See part one of Alexander C. (1967), Notes on the Synthesis of Form,; it. ed. (edited by Sergio Los) Note sulla sintesi della forma, Edizioni Il Saggiatore, Milano.

Ciber-space has produced a great epistemological upset. The distance between object and subject is reduced to zero. Point of view and point of state overlap. Subject is not outside but in the vision. Interaction is tactile much more than visual. In fact if screen can be considered the new medium between mind and virtual world, it doesn’t separate, instead it captures human mind and inserts it in a new world assisted by computer. Mouse works as a kind of “hand of the mind” (de Kerckhove, D., op. cit., p.38). As Derrick de Kerckhove asserts, the literary introversion of book is reversed into the interactive extroversion of the computer.

Edward W. Soja highlights all critical approach to ciber-space, while affirming an escape from reality, constantly refer their descriptions to precise urban context that are recognisable in their specific characters. “In the main critical approach to ciberspace the utopic, literal and metaphoric assertion are literally and metaphorically contrasted by a persistent reference to an environment that is specifically urban: Los Angeles and Bay Area, New York, Washington D.C., Miami, Chicago, Vancouver, London, Tokyo, Paris, etc.”. in in Soja E. W. (2001), Digital Communities, simcities and the hyperreality of everyday life, in Lotus 110 -, Milano, p. 76.

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“theory of information” (Ivi, p. 75). Later, the union of “ciber” to “space” inaugurates the space dimension of cibernetic.

The choice to use the prefix “ciber” instead of “virtual” reveals the conscious attempt to recover the original meaning of ciber-space as a controlled (computer assisted) and virtual (but not mental) space, strictly referred to an urban context Ciber-space is the space dimension of information5. It “overturns the relation between man and information, putting man into information” (Novak M.,1993, p. 234). As “space” it is the result of a cognitive process. As mental space it is a virtual space. As physical space it has its own rules that are expressed by codes. Implosion is one of its main characters6. Its “clearly a de-materialized architecture” is “ an architecture that is not satisfied by space, shape and light and other character of real world. It is an architecture of unpredictable relations among intangible elements. (…). The liquid architecture is an architecture that breathes and pulsates. The liquid architecture is an architecture whose form is contingent to spectator interests” (Novak M., op. cit. p.234).

3. Nowadays crisis of “unsuitable reality”.

New media and technologies have wreaked a breakdown in human thinking upsetting the traditional idea of a homogeneous and isotropic space and a notion of time strictly linked with a positivist sense of progress.

Considering reality a cultural construction stimulates a deep reflection on the way new instruments are changing our “production” of reality. We are experiencing a dramatic cultural adaptation that marks the passage from a conception of reality (the solid structure of traditional reality based on a specific idea of material, space and time7, to another that unnecessarily will erase the previous one. Instead they will coexist together. The affected nature of the crisis consists in the drastic cultural and epistemological change this process requires. History, as we have seen, is characterized by “crisis of unsuitable reality” (Manzini E.,1993), by transformations from one idea of space to another. But this process was almost unconscious because it happens during a large period of time. Today cultural adaptation imposes a conscious interrogation on reality in a short time frame.

In the past, idea of reality was founded on material consistence and duration. Reiteration of experiences assured the conservation and improvement of principles. Time permitted construction of senses, what is called semiotics of things. Architecture lied on the idea of permanence and firmness of significance, stability and consistence (Ibidem).

The information technology processes break the solid structure of traditional reality based on a specific idea of material, space and time. Despite that in history breakdown soils always open a new world of experiences and possibilities. The prophetic Frollo assertion “ceci tuerà cela” should be turn into “ceci deviendra cela”8.

In the next section we will try to clarify the nature of contemporary “places of mutation”.

4. Contemporary places of mutation: new inter-cities geographies.

Globalization and explosion of technologies (TIC) has changed geography of inhabited places. However, despite to past prevision, cities are not collapsed. Concentration and dispersion coexist in the territories of Ciber-space is definitely the “space visualisation of information, available in global system of elaboration of the same, though communication nets”. Tagliagambe S., op. cit., p.101 6 “As a mind that emerges from a neurological activity, clearly physiological” (de Kerckhove, D., op. cit., p.21), ciber-space needs of a material support that is electricity. Electricity, as the main ciber-space technology, has introduced a new relation with space, as well as press and alphabet did in the past. But if press extends space (by pushing an explosive and fragmented tendency), electricity concentrates space in a specific point. If press diffuses information in an extended space, electricity converges information in a node.

7 The traditional idea of a homogeneous and isotropic space and a notion of time strictly linked with a positivist sense of progress.

8 Essays “architecture and media” in - Lotus 75-, Milano, 1993, pp. 113-131.

5

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global economy. A thick network of nodes and connections fixes the structure of “high specialized interactive geographies of inter-cities” [17]. Nodes represent new centralities, “inhabited infrastructures” (I Ivi, p.28) of contemporary territories. They are places of concentration, information, diversity, and simultaneity. Nodes are cities.

The reason of the phenomenon stands in the structure and in the “potential” of city. Form of the city seems to respond to the necessities, to the dynamic structure of global economy. “Density and centrality assume a new strategic meaning: physical density is the urban form that received an increasing complex number of activities to the management, to the maintenance, to the design, implementation and coordination of global company and trades” (Ibidem).

Density as diversity, as concentration is the substance of historical cities. Nevertheless, nowadays those structures don’t work anymore. It’s not a question of dimension. The problem is that cities of history are not efficient, cannot support global economy that, it is important to understand, needs of material, physical places. “Density of central places, gives the social connectivity that permit to a company or a trade to maximize the advantages of its own technological connectivity”. [20], In the world of fluxes and interactions, cities should be conceived as “inhabited infrastructures”, thick nodes of global economy, dense places of connections, of interferences, of activities that are merged in a synergic and efficient way. The complexity of past cities has to be re-interpreted and converted into a new type of complexity, that one of global economy. This raises an architectural problem that involves the conception of project as transformation process and its capability to activate a mutation, to generate new inhabited places, interfaces between physical and ciber-spaces, but that necessarily have to do with physical space that is the place where men breath, live, work, “the boundary of the containing body at which it is in contact with the contained body.” [21].

5. Model as instrument of comprehension and transformation To introduce the problem of contemporary architectural design project, it is necessary to clarify the relation between reality and representation, that finds in the project itself, a moment of synthesis.

Scientific revolution of the last decades plays an important role by introducing a new approach to context, to the interference between object and subject, by studying the unconscious and conscious process of adaptability and comprehension, and the interference between living organisms and environment. As quantum mechanics introduces the concept of phenomena, of “potentia”, enlighten the importance of context (hic et nunc) and the observer (culture) in the process of knowledge, neurosciences give evidence to the strict relation of interaction between “reality of the other” and subject. Irreversibility and individuality of scientific measurement contrast with the reversibility of real phenomena. What we experience is the “potentia”, or the possibility/inclination something happens. The space and temporal Galilean homogeneity collapses. Observer projects on reality its own thinking categories. The interference between context and subject generates our representation of world that transforms reality itself in a mutual symbiotic exchange. In accordance with this scientific approach the discovering of neuron mirrors demonstrates that the direct vision of an action provokes in the observer the activation of the same neural circuit responsible to control the execution of the same action. Observation activates the automatic simulation of the action and its consequent comprehension. Therefore perception is not a simply physiological registration of data but a simulated and projective action. Body is the medium.

As Italo Calvino affirms “to know is to insert something in real realm; it, therefore, to deform reality” (Calvino I., 2004). To represent is not just to produce image. It doesn’t mean to copy. “To represent” means to produce an image, that we call “map”, of something that in a certain sense, has some similarities with an object of the “real world”, but not coincides with it. Maps represent the structure of things that is the form, the organisation of elements produced by intellect9.

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In this sense landscape assumes an interactive and constructive conception. It is a place, a system of elements selected by the observer.

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This operation implicates the capability “to read”, that signifies to recognize an object as functional, or usable in a determined context for a purpose, in accordance with Heidegger meaning of “being in the world”, “inhabiting”. Therefore representation requires invention. It is project. It transforms reality.

Human intelligence activates an operation of knowledge that requires selection and that depends on the capacities of observer to “read”, “to comprehend”, so to select from complexity some elements and put them together in a new system making that complexity tangible10. This capability is given by experience and by shared culture that gather together all human experiences.

“Being able to read” and “being able to see” become the start point of a designing process. “The distance permit to re-construct context oriented to a specific necessity and to recognize it the possibility of transformation. This is the ontological sense of our possibility to comprehend world ” (Tagliagambe S., op. cit., p.30).

Italo Calvino says “The city are made by the eyes that look at them”.

To comprehend, reveal and transform complexity of city human intelligence generates models. Models as “products of intelligence” and “instruments of reduction of complexity”, construct relations among selected elements recognized as significant to a specific purpose and captured from reality, to form the structure of the model, built on an analogical principle.

Silvano Tagliagambe offers an interesting explanation of the concept of model, useful to sustain this argument, by making a list of its main characters. First he stands that “model re-constructs new modality to visualize reality”. “It is capable to produce innovative perceptive styles”. Model gives shape to a sensible phenomenon that is not comprehensible. It is the representation of the form, that is the structure of a phenomenon, not the effectual phenomenon in itself. It is a map that works on the principle of analogy. It is a sort of weave, a coherent system of relations among points. Analogy is not similarity; instead it is based on a sort of structural isomorphism that refers just to position. It is topological and relational. A semiotic and conceptual construction gives it content and sense. It is not a copy but it refers indirectly to physical phenomena through its rational principles and categories. (Renovation of Kant’s lesson). The construction of a model is conditioned to the presence of a necessity, of a problem of knowledge, of comprehension that can be solved only through a simplification of reality, through the model. If model is complex as reality, it is not useful.

6. Architecture of intelligence as space of possibilities If space as “cultural construction” and place as “extension of human body”, permit to get the current crisis as a “soil of possibilities” and to give a new “virtual” dimension to ciber-space, as “artefact of intelligence”, it is in the interfaces between physical and virtual space that architecture reveals its capacities to generate mutation in the contemporary places of inter-cities. Ciber-space extends physical and virtual (mental) space, offering the opportunities to enrich the domain of possibilities generated by human mind.

Its retro-active effect on effectual reality works in the field of representation, of design and of construction. Architecture, as we have seen, constructs models to reveal, comprehend and transform reality adapting to cultural changes. Again, nowadays architecture needs of models. But these models cannot be the same of those of the past. They should be flexible, adaptable, opened to mutation, capable to respond to different inputs, social, economic and environmental.

In the field of representation new media and technology permit to give shape to mutation and to construct scenarios in the dominion of ciber-space. This means an opportunity not just to translate a product of imagination into something of sensible, “reading by eyes”, but especially because it permits to communicate an idea that become collective. To design complexity requires a connected effort of a collective subject, constituted by different individuals with their own identity but supported by a shared

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This kind of vision is called by S. Tagliagambe “gestaltic vision”, a vision that represents the “non –verbalized component of perceptive capacity and its relative knowledge. The specific object of this vision is the structure of the figure, or the complex relations that connect elements and parts that compose it”. Tagliagambe S., op. cit., p.101

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culture. Possibility and capability to communicate ideas are the first step for a shared management of resources.

New descriptive model are able to construct new maps that reveal global inter-cities geographies by gathering, elaborating and interpreting the multiplicity and heterogeneity of data selected from physical space.

It is in the domain of designing process that ciber-space reveals its own role of “potentia”. Working as an “extension of imagination” by giving the possibility to shape a virtual image produced by human mind, it increases human imagination, generating new images and activating a process that is the same, in a certain sense, that is activated in the reading of a book.

However project is not a collection of data “the natural result of accumulation of data, of the information, of the knowledge, according to (…) a tendency that Calvino call ‘rational and geometrical or algebraic tendency of intellect’, that in ‘Le città invisibili’ is personified by KubaiKan”. However it is not the direct result of a sudden inspiration ((Tagliagambe S., op. cit., p.30).

Project is developed through models that from an original and resistant nucleus, by a process of trial and error, are shaped to respond to a series of requests, with criteria of efficiency, flexibility and adaptability.

Strategy gives continuity to the process. Ciber-space constitutes the virtual realm where process can be controlled, verify, developed, by fixing a resistant structure and working on flexible and variable elements in the continuous interferences between physical reality and ciber-reality.

[1] In the thickness of interfaces, “architecture of intelligence” (De Kerckhove D. , op. cit. as “the architecture of connectivity” (Ivi, p. 7) generates possibilities, dense places of connections and shared intelligence.

References Alexander C. (1967), Notes on the Synthesis of Form,; it. ed. (edited by Sergio Los) Note sulla sintesi della forma, Edizioni Il Saggiatore, Milano.

Burdett R. (editeb by), (2006), Città: architettura e società. 10 Mostra internazionale di architettura: la Biennale di Venezia, Marsilio, Venice.

Calvino I. (1972), Le città invisibili, Einaudi, Torino.

Calvino I., Lezioni americane. Sei proposte per il prossimo millennio, Oscar Mondadori, Milano, 2004.

De Kerckhove D. (2001), The architecture of intelligence, Birkhauser, Basel; it. ed., L'architettura dell'intelligenza, Testo & immagine, Torino.

Manzini E. (1993), “Mutamenti Percettivi”, in Lotus 75, Milano, 1993, pp. 116-119.

Novak M. (1993), “Architetture liquide nel ciberspazio”, in “M. Benedikt (edited by), Cyberspace. Primi passi nell realtà virtuale, Muzio, Padova.

Sassen S. (2006), “Perché le città sono importanti”, in Città, architettura e società, Catalogo della mostra Internazionale di Architettura, La Biennale di Venezia, Venezia.

Soja E. W. (2001), “Digital Communities, simcities and the hyperreality of everyday life”, in Lotus 110, Milano, pp. 73-87.

Tagliagambe S. (2005), Le due vie della percezione e l'epistemologia del progetto, F. Angeli, Milano.

Virilio P. (1993), “L’interfaccia”, in Lotus 75, Milano, p. 126.

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The Fluvial City: Change and Representation Case of Dora Riparia.

Natalia Kudriavtseva E-mail: designbyaspect@yahoo.co.uk

This paper looks at the changing relationship between the city and the river, particularly, how the river influences the development of the city and how the development of the city controls the life of the river.

At the heart of this matter is a paradox; cities are man-made intentional constructs. Rivers begin as natural phenomena until the city intervenes. The biography of any river flowing through a city will be an unhappy one; expect crude surgery, amputations, peremptory diversions, gentle meanders straightened, courses shortened. This subject must be approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. Geography, geology, anthropology, sociology and economics are each forms of representation. A multidisciplinary approach must, however, set a hierarchy of disciplines; in this study the relationship between Geography and Architecture is our focus.

Keywords: River, Geography, Settlement

1. Preface The focus of research, which this paper summarises, is the relationship of the city and the river, both in concept and in practice. In particular, the enquiry is the manner in which the river influences the development of the city and the way in which the development of the city constrains and controls the life of a river. At the heart of this matter is a paradox; cities are man-made, are intentional constructs, rivers begin are natural phenomena. Cities are planned; rivers evolve as part of an independent natural process, until cities intervene.

2. Introduction The territory is a set of conditions, being continuously generated in reaction to one another. The territory is anchored by a series of permanent elements, however, by means of which, the thread of human activity with its physical knots in the form of settlements is held in time. Even when the expanding urban agglomerates consume settlements, the pattern can be traced through its geographically routed manmade footprints.

Cartographic images, whether they are intended to serve as actual accounts or project visions, are essential in reconstructing the logic of the sequences of transformation within a complex settlement process,

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reflecting aspirations and the human desire to achieve and accommodate them. Geographical conditions predetermine various long-term patterns in the built up fabric and help us understand the distribution of human activity, reliant on the use of natural resources, largely defined by the interrelation of land and the waterways.

3. The Crisis: Of the Idea and of the City.

Everywhere the city is in crisis. Population growth and rapid economic change are creating larger and larger cities, massive urban sprawls which, if planned at all, are done so on an ad hoc, add-on basis. This can be exemplified in the terminology of the ‘old centre’. Many cities now have an old centre, frequently a place of coming together in a public space, with one or more new centres constructed elsewhere to accommodate a greatly enlarged geographic and demographic spread. The notion of a city with more than one centre seems contradictory; it implies fragmentation within the city. Meanwhile, other cities are in decline, shrinking within their borders, unable to retain population, relying largely on state subsidy to slow their decline. The original economic activities, which many cities were planned around, are also being unpredictably superseded by new activities. Many have become visitor theme parks, which can be seen as a way of preserving the city, but can feel artificial.

Behind this lies a deep intellectual crisis over the concept of the city. We struggle to match reality to the ideal. The history of ideas is filled with a number of versions of the ideal city elaborated by a variety of philosophers, moralists, theologians and architects. The genealogy of thought can be traced through the ideas of Vitruvius, Alberti, Filarette, Scamozzi, Howard, Geddes, Rossi, Le Corbusier, Soleri, Koolhaas, who were all concerned with the idea of the city. Some versions of the ideas of the city are more prescriptive than others (Rosenau H., 1959). One line of thought is for the city to be conceived as rigid design. Others are more adaptable to geographical conditions. For instance Alberti, referring to the treatment of streets, suggests that those can be laid out “in the manner of rivers”, following an angulating pattern. Adaptation of site to needs, the ‘commoditas’, remains relevant through time.

Why should the notion of an ideal city be of such interest to such a diverse group of thinkers? The answer lies at least partly in the notion that the ideal city is a metaphor for a desired state of human relations. This desired state varies widely. This might be a state where ideal city dwellers live in static harmony, or live in perfect equality regulated by a universal set of rules, and are able to take part in a perfect democracy and so on. An ideal city may encourage virtues or eliminate vices, provide public venues for beneficial interaction, or provide public parks, which offer a controlled version of the natural world. The permutations are endless.

Au fond, these various versions of the ideal city are based either on the view that the design of the city can improve human nature or better accommodate it as it is. But in all cases, a very strong emphasis is and continues to be placed on the role of reason in design. Indeed, most if not all treatises on the design of a city are based around the use of geometrical forms and diagrams. In all these versions, the city is designed to be permanent or semi-permanent and therefore to shape and to channel the way in which the human interactions take place within its limits.

The narrative of a city becomes apparent not only in the city’s production phases, manifested in a substantiation of its constructed presence but also in its un-constructing episodes and the resulting voids or the formation of undefined areas. These occurrences of unconstruction are significant in the temporal process and should not be seen as negative. They activate future potential responses to the present urban conditions (Young J., 2013).

The most recent condition of merging of the regional edges and polycentric sprawling, is seen as a new form of territorial organization, born in between urban and rural, remains ill-defined for it is neither one

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nor the other, hanging on to both. We are urged to embrace this condition in an attempt to adapt urgently to these changing dimensions. We are now operating in a digital framework, so perhaps the need for the physical projection is less critical. Adapting to conditions but also adapting conditions per se, is what humanity has been practicing by means of architecture for as long as it has been trying to control the territory.

How does one approach the subject so complex as the city?

A subject as complex and multi-layered as that of the city has to be approached from a multidisciplinary perspective. Geography, geology, anthropology, sociology, engineering, ecology and economics all need to be taken into consideration. Architecture as a multidisciplinary discipline along with planning aims to bring all these elements together. Geology, for instance, sets limits on the natural course of the river but also the possibility of building depending on whether subsidence or flooding take place in a particular location. Geography and economics are pleated into this symbiosis. For instance, until the advent of the steam engine, cities required an economic hinterland capable of providing the city with fresh food produces. The scientific Hydrology & Hydro-geology, which study the ground water movement, allow understanding of the chain-like processes and cycles, triggered by moving water. Contemporary cities are more and more facing the problem of flooding; rainwater management is becoming an important concern directly influencing the urban design. “The pipe is dead”, declares James Hitchmough, “…the future of the cities will be driven by how we manage water.” (Hitchmough J., 2013).

A multidisciplinary approach must, however, set a hierarchy of disciplines, used in a given analysis, while noting where these overlap to keep them distinct. Taking a historical perspective the set of disciplines taken as relevant has evolved and expanded.

4. The River.

Rivers run through cities for a reason. Until the XX century one would struggle to find a city without a river. Rivers provide fresh water, waste disposal, transport, means to generate energy, and much else.

There is an on-going contradiction that lies at the heart of the relationship between the city and the river: even an ideal city needs a river. A river is a natural phenomena and nature cannot be completely controlled. Rivers may be dammed, diverted, canalised, their banks artificially reinforced to become ‘permanent’, they may be forced underground, built over, bridged, dredged (deepen or widen) or allowed to silt up, but they remain a force of nature. It is not by chance that so many designs for the ideal city specify the use of canal systems to replace natural rivers; systems to be drawn using geometry, according to a rational plan. The real life biography of any river flowing through a city is likely to be an unhappy one; expect crude surgery, sudden amputations, peremptory diversions, gentle meanders straightened, courses shortened.

The “natural” processes, such as meandering of a river have their causes. It is not only human who is constantly taming the stream, the reluctant soil, rejecting the river, forces the stream to find its course where geomorphology permits.

5. Dora Riparia. Its Geographical Context.

River Dora crosses Piedmont, which lies in the ancient sea basin known as the Padana Plain or the Po Valley, and cover an area of approximately 46,000 sq. km. The basin is theoretically divided into the lower (humid) and the upper (dry) parts. The terraced nature of the terrain is a result of a complex overlay of the so-called Alpine thrust belts and fluvial conoids. Essentially it is a glacial make-up that forms the primary component of the geomorphological sediment holding the course of Dora Riparia (Pavia G., Giardino M.,

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Lucchesi S., 2011). The territory lies on a sloping site, dropping down from the Alps towards River Po. The drop of levels just within the inner city of Turin, between Porto Susa and river Po is of approximately 33 meters. The alluvial fan folds, which cover the plain in a web-like pattern, have urban significance. It takes a strong river to manoeuvre to find its way and survive by meandering to eventually join river Po at the end of its 125 km journey across the Susa Valley.

Figure 1. The present-day course of river Dora Riparia traced over Google Map extract covering the stretch between the confluence with River Po and up to Pianezza.

Figure 2. The Tectonics of the Alps. Source: Goddard Earth Sciences Data & Information Services.

Figure 3. The terraced topographical setting of the city of Turin, at the confluence of the River Po and Dora Riparia. The quarter of Valdocco nests adjacent to Dora Riparia.

Turin in its pre-settlement presence is set out by a definitively favourable topographical condition. The location of the future city is found on the confluence of a major river, river Po with one of its principle tributaries – river Dora Riparia, confined by the Alps arching from the North to the West and the Apennine complex stretching Southeast.

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The territory, whose favourable condition was first recognized by the early Celtic settlements, later was chosen as the location for a Roman military camp. The Roman regular grid became the formalising of the city, which capitalised all the favourable strategic characteristics of the location.

And although through the middle Ages the city undergoes a number of radical and rapid stages of expansion, prompted by shifting social currents and political regimes, these stages get superimposed as layers and are merged in, weaving into the existing anchoring roman structure. The walled city is the epitome of security and autonomy, further reinforced by a series of earth fortifications in the XVI c, which complete the defensive military model. The city then starts to stretch in an almond shape extending parallel to Dora Riparia, approximating it at the same time (Marchis V., 1988).

Figure 4. Turin. The Key Stages of Expansion and Canalisation. ASCT. Figure 5. Ignazio G. Parrocel. View of Turin of the north-west with Dora Riparia in the forground. First half of the XVIII c.

Collection of ASCT.

The city establishes its power and affirms itself as the seat of the Duchy of Savoy between 1416-1860, succeeded by the dynasty of Savoia-Carignano 1831-1861.

The city is then programmed through a series of models. Following a number of proposals for expansion, most notably those of the XVII c, the city progressively stretches towards Dora and across it. By the end of the XIX c Dora Riparia is firmly held and controlled by the city.

The majority of the canals in Turin and the adjacent communities were constructed to branch and feed off Dora Riparia to supply the productive activity. Dora, a minor-scale river by the general standards, nevertheless offered sufficient opportunity for this. The earliest canals date back to the XV c. when they were designed to serve the first mills. Later and up to the XIX c the river consumption spectrum included mills, farms, textile (and other) factories, forges and an arsenal. [7] Throughout its history, Dora is not so much a boundary, but rather a trigger and a mechanism in the operation of the territory. During that time the river and the canals are often rerouted to accommodate more diverse activity. [8] Even the adjacent communities, such as Collegno are being absorbed into the conurbation of wider Turin.

The boundaries get blurred; occasional mega commercial inserts are planted at a contrasting scale, to the existing civic space. The advance of mobility is mainly responsible for alterations to the perception of space. These processes reflect cultural imagination and the productive potential of places. What one may see as the making of a place is also likely to be seen as the unmaking of a place (Young J., 2013).

The cartographical images, such as figure 9, blend together reasonably accurate representations of physical geography conveyed through several filters of interpretation. These are communicated using the topography and architecture as the basis, representing an implied social order, a view of the local economy and of the local politico-military strategy. The maps are symbolically charged (Motta G., Ravagnati C., 2009).

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Figure 6. The territory of Turin and beyond in the 2-nd half of the XIX c. showing the canal network.

The industrial flourishing is superseded by a period of neglect and decline, but by this point the territory is already in the heart of Turin.

Over the last two centuries we see larger units emerging within the urban and rural fabric. The medieval compact density is still there but the layers are added on and are amalgamated. We see a dramatic and imminent transformation when the city’s walls get demolished in the 1800, during the Napoleonic occupation. The city becomes open and exposed for over half a century only to reinstate in 1853 the new boundary of defence, delineated by the introduction of tollgates. In the meantime the canals are being continuously modified, improved and updated.

Figure 7. The designs for modifications to the canal network in the XIX c.

Figure 8. The Key Stages. Torino; Story of the City.

6. Conclusion.

The purpose of this analysis is to prepare a well-informed basis and lay ground to further interpret and reignite local interest in geography and productive history of the territory; to counteract areas of neglect and those in danger of being eroded as well as suggest locations for developing potential to bring economic benefits for the area. This paper is a setting out of preliminary groundwork survey of the subject, to provide a narrative of what’s happened over the centuries to the territory along Dora Riparia.

There is a need to emphasise and understand territorial processes from a geographical perspective.

Geography lies at the core of human activities. A settlement is not accidental. The river’s role may have changed drastically but there is a role that remains and needs to be updated.

We are relying on different technologies now. Advances such as electricity have taken away the river’s primary industrial role. River is no longer the engine of production in these locations, but it continues to serve and offers multiple new forms of use. The permeability - connectivity network is of an increasing demand. River is a means to connect communities and people want to regain the pedestrian dimension.

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The recognition of the river’s long-term value calls for regular re-evaluation and tentative informed proposals for enhancement. The economical revival is pressing. Improved ecological and accessibility schemes will attract recreational activity and use to these locations. There may well be an opportunity to revive some traditional businesses.

Figure 9. Turin during the siege of the 1640. Collection of the ASCT.

References Hitchmough J., (2013), Speaking in Lecture “The London Olympic Park And Its Post-games Transformation”, Turin.

Marchis V., (1988), “Acque, Mulini e Lavoro a Torino”, in Bracco G. (a cura di) Acque, Ruote e Mulini a Torino, Citta di Torino, 1988.

Motta G., Ravagnati C., (a cure di), (2009), Cartografia di fiume per il progetto di città, Techograph srl, Bergamo.

Pavia G., Giardino M., Lucchesi S., (2011), Prima Della Citta, Torino: Storia Di Una Citta.

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Rosenau H., (1959), The Ideal City: In Its Architectural Evolution, Routledge and Kegan Paul, Boston.

Young J., (2013), Speaking in Lecture “Detroitspace�, Turin.

Acknowledgments Dottoressa Paola Bianchi at the Historical Archive of Turin, ASCT, who gave a wonderful introductory tour of the Archive and on a number of occasions generously provided loan of her own copies of books, essential for my research.

Arch. Christina Boido, Politecnico di Torino, provided guidance on the organisation of the collections at the Historical Archive.

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Historical-virtual reconstruction of an Italian garden Imagining the past of Villa lo Zerbino Anna Toth Politecnico di Milano Design Department.

E-mail: anna.da.toth@gmail.com

Davide Spallazzo Politecnico di Milano Design Department.

E-mail: davide.spallazzo@polimi.it

This paper discusses a model for the virtual reconstruction of the historic garden of Villa lo Zerbino in Genoa. We describe the process that starts from a specific knowledge (based on documents, drawings and maps) and leads to a 3d model focusing on the vegetation elements. This representation allows addressing issues peculiar to the reconstruction of historic gardens, such as the analysis of their evolution over time and the complexity associated with modeling the vegetation. In so doing, this paper contributes to academic research on historic heritage and proposes 3D modeling as a basis for the restoration project, as well as a means to reveal architectural patrimony to the public. Also, by providing a 3D representation of the changes witnessed by the villa over centuries, this paper aims to stimulate further contributions on the co-evolution of historic heritage and urban landscape.

Keywords: virtual reconstruction, historic garden 1. Introduction Realistic virtualizations of architectural heritage allow the audience to feel the sensation of a time travel, which collects the memories of a site in one digital product. This result requires a vast research work in the historic documentation, later confronted with the surveys of the present situation, together with modeling abilities in order to provide a highly realistic digital model. A blurry image is indeed what the virtual reconstruction has to clarify.

Dealing with historic gardens further increases the complexity of the task, since vegetation is ephemeral by nature and usually poorly documented, and its organic shapes require a great effort in the modeling phase.

Furthermore, very few examples of virtual reconstruction of historic gardens are available in the literature (Ceconello M., Spallazzo D., 2010) and often focus on the virtualization of architectural elements within

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the gardens (Huang Y., Liu Y., and Wang Y., 2009) or on very large areas such as landscapes (Niederoest J., 2002).

It is therefore valuable to deepen the research in the field of virtual reconstruction of historic gardens, and their vegetation in particular, in order to study their evolution over time and analyze their relationship with the surrounding landscape.

The project we discuss in this paper fits into this strand, describing the virtual reconstruction of Villa lo Zerbino in Genoa.

The aim of the project is ambitious: to reconstruct the villa, the garden and the surrounding areas as they were in different ages, in particular in the 16th and 19th centuries, in order to analyze their evolution over time. The project is still ongoing and, to date, the virtual reconstruction of three sample areas at the 19th century condition is completed.

Thanks to the virtual reconstruction of the three areas of Villa lo Zerbino, it’s now possible to study the evolution of the garden from the 19th century and today, and recreate also the views of the surrounding landscape from the villa complex. This allows us to enter the garden and have a complete sense of how the landscape was part of the villa.

One of the most important characteristics of Alessian villas is indeed their position. The main axis of the villa is always perpendicular to the mountainside, offering a beautiful panorama from the villa complex.

The building itself has a cubical form defined by a transparent construction, which allows seeing through the villa from both the entrances, letting the garden inside the villa, recreating a perfect harmony in which the main character is no longer the building but the garden, whose surrounding landscape is a close extension.

Confronting the historical maps of the 16th century, the 19th century model and maps and photos of the present situation we can also note how the urban development of a city becomes an essential factor from the point of view of a single villa. By virtue of the representation of the presumed panorama of the city from Villa lo Zerbino we can also study the relationship between the villa complex and its surrounding landscape.

On this experience, we focus our paper that contextualizes historically the villa and its evolution, describes the methodology adopted and presents and discusses the results achieved.

2. Villa lo Zerbino The case study identified for the project of historical-virtual reconstruction is Villa Balbi Durazzo Gropallo allo Zerbino (Figure 1), one of the most important examples of an Alessian villa built in the city of Genoa, in a suburban position, between 1599 and 1604.

The choice of the position of the villa describes its main typology: a suburban complex far from the city centre in a dominating position. The distance from the urban settlement guaranteed a strong detach from the ordinary lifestyle giving a commanding sensation to its owner.

Over the centuries, Villa lo Zerbino witnessed various changes. Along with the expansion of the city, which slowly reached and incorporated the villa, the layout of its garden was modified following the English landscape garden trends of the late 17th century.

Villa lo Zerbino has been chosen not only for its cultural importance, but also because of the rather rich documentation (such as maps, images, surveys, descriptions) that facilitates a historic representation of its appearance over time. Moreover, the preservation of the 19th century layout allows recognizing the original project of the garden created by the renowned architect, Andrea Tagliafichi.

The historical reconstruction of the Villa regards mainly two periods, the 16th and the 19th century (Figure 2).

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Figure 1. Villa Balbi Durazzo Gropallo allo Zerbino (source: http://villalozerbino.it/ )

Figure 2. Simplified layout of the villa in the 16th century (left) and in the 19th century (right)

The sixteenth century villa, built out of the city walls and far away from the center of the medieval Genoa, had a regular layout featured with straight, perpendicular avenues followed by pergolas and flowerbeds. It was Martin Pierre Gauthier, in the 18th century, who presented the reliefs of Villa lo Zerbino in his book (Gauthier M. P., 1830). Although the author of the collection never saw the villa in its 16th century form, his drawings present what may have been the plan of the garden until the changes of the 19th century.

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In a letter1, in 1804, Ippolito Durazzo, the villa’s owner at that time, writes about his intention to modify the structure of the garden of villa lo Zerbino. The architect of the new plan is Andrea Tagliafichi, who gives the garden a completely different style, following the English landscape trends of the era. He conserves several parts of the original garden plan but radically transforms the others, creating a perfect harmony between old and new elements. Even in the absence of any plan left by the architect, the present conditions of the villa allowed us to understand the original forms of the 19th century project. A map (Poggi M., 1898) supports our historic reconstruction of the original project, although it does not provide additional information.

Regarding the growing urban landscape of the 19th century, among the several accurate maps available, we used that provided by Barbieri (Barbieri P., 1938).

3. Sample areas In order to provide an impression of the full appearance of the garden, we focused on three areas in three different terraces (Figure 3), virtually reconstructing at their 19th century condition. We choose these areas so as to study three types of transformations from the point of view of the layout of the garden. In so doing, we also show how the relationship between the landscape and the garden of the villa has changed over the decades.

Figure 3. Sample areas chosen for the virtual reconstruction

The first sample area is the first terrace (Figure 4), behind the main entrance of the villa. It comprises a large avenue followed by symmetrical flowerbeds. The original plan of Andrea Tagliafichi maintained the straight avenue of the 16th century garden in order to organize an optically ideal entrance in the garden: the building is in the center of the composition of this area. The recent installation of the double row of tiglia cordata covers completely the villa, destroying the garden composition.

The 19th century layout provided also rows of evergreens on its lateral parts, closing the visuals from and towards the villa. These green structures revealed to be fundamental during the development of the close urban zones, but the lack of conservation of the area damaged the protection of the villa complex.

1

Castelbarco A. C., Lo Zerbino a Genova, Le dimore storiche

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Figure 4. Current picture of the front of the villa taken from the first area

The second area is located in the second terrace (Figure 5). With the changes implemented by Andrea Tagliafichi, the character of the second terrace was completely modified.

The 16th century layout was replaced by an area characterized by two ponds and four couples of phoenix dactylifera. The rest of the terrace is composed by a forest, an important element of the English landscape gardens.

These changes resulted in alterations in the relationship between the landscape and the garden as well. The urban center, which in the 19th century became an important element of the panorama, was less visible due to the vegetation of the second terrace.

Figure 5. Current picture of the second area

From the third terrace, the last sample area, the panorama is visible in a wide angle of view, dominated by the sea and by the silhouette of the Cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta. In the 19th century this sight was

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characterized by the columns of the pergola that surrounds the area and divided the panorama creating different viewpoints.

With the evolution of the urban landscape, the vegetation around the third terrace (Figure 6) started to have a protecting role, but conserved the open character of the layout. The present situation of this area has a completely closed aspect, since a spontaneous green structure covers the panorama.

Figure 6: Current picture of the third area

4. Methodology The virtualization project of Villa lo Zerbino entails a high level of complexity due mainly to its extremely varied nature and to the incompleteness of documentation that obviously increase for more distant epochs.

Looking at the reconstruction from the only point of view of the modeller, the difficulty regards the very varied nature of the complex that encompasses architectonical elements, vegetation (both formal and natural growth components) and the surroundings. Each element brings with it different needs, different levels of detail and diverse modelling approach which result in a necessarily hybrid methodology.

Furthermore various and often incomplete sources arouse the question of the reliability of the resulting model and invite to reflect on how to disclose diverse degrees of trustworthiness in the model itself.

As already stated the aim of the project here discussed is to provide a highly realistic virtual reconstruction of the complex at different epochs, intended as a means to raise awareness of the historical importance of Villa lo Zerbino and of its transformations over time.

For this reason a very high level of dimensional accuracy of the model is not required and very expensive and time consuming survey technics such as photogrammetry and laser scanning has been avoided.

An accurate architectural and botanical survey of the garden has been indeed carried out to verify the completeness and reliability of the available sources and used as a basis for the modelling phase.

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Survey, modelling and texturing are the essential steps followed for the project that faced the complexity described above with a hybrid modelling approach.

Concerning the architectural part, the process followed the methodology elaborated and tested in previous projects (Ceconello M., Spallazzo D., 2010); Ceconello M., Paquet E., 2007)that implies the definition of different levels of geometric simplification for the architectural elements based on their formal complexity and importance in the overall scene.

Texture mapping and bump maps increase the level of realism keeping the total amount of polygons under control.

By virtue of a consolidated methodology and of the experience gained in previous projects, we were able to create a model with high level of realism in its architectural parts, in short time and with a good control on the number of polygons.

The vegetation elements are divided in two groups, basically separated by the differences of the garden trends. On the one hand, the formal vegetation has a dominating presence in the layout of the 16th century. Shrubs and trees are shaped by ars topiaria, which consists in pruning the elements to give them a geometric form.

On the other hand, the project realized by Andrea Tagliafichi follows the rules of the English landscape garden and results in less visibility of the human work on the vegetation.

The aforementioned reasons indicated the necessity to divide the vegetation in two groups in the modelling process.

On one side, the formal garden elements have been modelled on the basis of procedures elaborated in a previous project (Ceconello M., Spallazzo D., 2010) that met the same issue. In respect to that project we had to face a much wider amount of formal vegetation and necessarily to improve the procedure in order to preserve a high level of realism without weighing down the model.

Thanks to a well-balanced employment of polygons, photographic textures and technics, such as the scattering, we managed to obtain realistic models of formal vegetation with a relatively small amount of polygons.

The other group of the vegetation is comprised by existing polygonal models, which have been chosen after accurately studying the botanical species in the garden. These models’ dimensions and colours were modified according to the necessities of the garden.

The visualization of the lawn was another part of the modelling that demanded several tests balancing between highly realistic polygonal models that imply an excessive number of polygons and faster techniques such as displacement and texture mapping that keep the polygons under control but don’t achieve the same realistic results.

Modelling the grass implies also adjusting the creation of unwanted patterns that unveil the use of repeated modules, solved in the resulting model with the superimposition of photographic textures and polygonal models at different scale.

As mentioned, the surrounding landscape has a relevant role in the structure of the villa. It is not only a background, but a panorama, in which certain elements, such as the sea and the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta, have particular importance. Therefore, the cathedral has been accurately modelled. By contrast, since the rest of the landscape has significance only as group of buildings, whose presence is understood in terms of the distribution of the urban structure and not as singular elements, their modelling allowed a simplified approach.

The volumes of the buildings are based on the plan of [7] and their height and colours, without textures, was hypothesized studying the conserved 16th century architecture in Genoa.

The position of trees is defined approximately and the use of billboards allowed us to obtain a good visual effect without weighing down the model.

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5. Results and discussion The virtual model of Villa lo Zerbino realistically represents three different areas of the complex at the 19th century condition: the first terrace with the villa, the second and third terrace (Figures 7, 8a and 8b, 9a and 9b respectively).

Considering the important relationship between the Villa and the landscape, we modelled also the surrounding areas of villa lo Zerbino recreating a likely view of the 19th century panorama.

The virtualization project has been realized using a commercial software (Autodesk 3Ds Max), starting from the polygonal modelling till the production of photorealistic renderings.

As an early result of the project here described we can also mention the definition of a methodology for the historical-virtual reconstruction of a villa and its garden, made of two main stages: the historical reconstruction through the research of documentation and the virtual reconstruction as a means to verify the hypotheses and to disseminate the results.

Furthermore this project allowed to consolidate a methodology for the virtualization of historic villas defined in previous works (Ceconello M., Spallazzo D., 2010), partially modified to match different needs and face problems not previously encountered.

As already stated, the project is still on-going, and the virtualization must be completed including other areas and reconstructing the 16th century condition, but the three sample areas resulted to be meaningful for the project’s aims.

The photorealistic renderings allow indeed to easily compare the present condition with the 19th century project, increasing the awareness of the past of the villa for non-experts and providing scholars and experts with new means to study the villa’s evolution over time and its changing relation with the landscape.

For example, confronting the renderings with the photographic materials of the present we can note that the 19th century situation of the villa was the last moment of its glorious period. Even though the 19th century layout of the garden in its early forms apparently protected the villa from the urban development, our virtual model portrays a villa that is still able to create connections between its garden and the landscape. This continuous dialog, which is one of the main foundations of the characteristics of Villa lo Zerbino, now seems to suffer. The reason is not only the unavoidable advancement of the urban centre but also the uncontrolled growth of the vegetation of the garden.

Figure 7. Virtual reconstruction of the front view of the villa from the first area

The comparison between the two conditions allows also to infer hypothesis for future interventions on the garden: the green structure that had in the past the function to invite the landscape into the villa, appearing to enlarge its space, could now be transformed into a system capable of protecting the villa

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complex from the visual handicaps of the surroundings. At the same time, it could underline those landscape elements that have an antique role in the villa’s view, such as the sea and the cathedral of Santa Maria Assunta.

Figure 8a and 8b. two views of the virtual reconstruction of the second area Figure 9a and 9b. two views of the virtual reconstruction of the third area

6. Future works The experience of the historical-virtual reconstruction of Villa lo Zerbino identifies several venues for future work, some defined at the beginning of our project but still not completed and others emerged during the project development.

Completing the virtualization of the entire complex at its 19th century condition, together with the aforementioned reconstruction of the 16th century state, are certainly the first aims to be accomplished in order to enlarge the timeline and describe with completeness the evolution over time of such an important historic site. These new experiences could further assess the methodology here described, and make it available and reliable for other virtualization projects regarding historical villas and heritage as well.

Our work could also be the basis for restoration projects of historical sites, which require the detailed description of past situations: the virtual reconstruction provides indeed a likely visualisation of the past and can reveal hidden concepts (e.g. visual connections).

A polygonal model, suitably adapted, can also allow real time navigation both on the web and in large screen virtual theatre, providing users with an inspiring navigation in the past.

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Finally we should not forget that creating a virtual reconstruction of a heritage, as it was, means visualizing an uncertain past: we are not sure that it was exactly as we depict it but anyway we can pursue likelihood.

Furthermore the plausibility of the reconstruction can have different degrees within the same model, depending for example on the available documentation or on the accurateness of the surveys.

Assessing the level of reliability of our model and finding a way to represent it in the model itself is a challenge for the future: visualizing the uncertainty in the 3D models could indeed extend the potentials of the virtualization project, by giving a clear image of the quality of the available sources, by adopting new methods of visualization (colours, transparencies, etc.) and by providing several hypothetical images of the past.

References Barbieri P., (1938), Forma Genuae, Municipio di Genova, Genova.

Castelbarco A. C., Lo Zerbino a Genova, Le dimore storiche Ceconello M., Paquet E., (2007), Virtual urban design, Proceedings 9th Virtual reality International conference, 177-18.

Ceconello M., Spallazzo D., (2010), Virtual Reality for Enhanced Urban Design, 5th INTUITION International Conference Proceedings.

Ceconello M., Spallazzo D., (2010), Virtual Reality for the Exploitation of Houses and Historical Gardens. The Example of Villa Arconati, Vast 2010. 11th international symposium on virtual reality, archaeology and cultural heritage, Paris, 2010, pp. 37–40.

Gauthier M. P., (1830), Les plus beaux édifices de la ville de Gênes et de ses environs, Paris.

Huang Y., Liu Y., and Wang Y., (2009), AR-View: An augmented reality device for digital reconstruction of Yuangmingyuan, IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality - Arts, Media and Humanities, 2009. ISMAR-AMH 2009, pp. 3–7.

Niederoest J., (2002), Landscape as a historical object: 3D reconstruction and evaluation of a relief model from the 18th century, International Workshop on Visualization and Animation of Landscape, Kunming, China, 26-28 February.

Poggi M., (1898), Il piano di espansione di Genova - la planimetria di Villa Balbi Durazzo allo Zerbino.

Acknowledgments We would like to thank the owners of Villa Lo Zerbino for allowing the realization of the virtual reconstruction of the villa. We are also indebted to Bianca Falcidieno and Mauro Ceconello for their helpful comments and advice.

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Chinese expression of the urban landscape The contemporary spatial strategies of the traditional Chinese courtyard building Zhu Tan Politecnico di Milano E-mail: bamboo.tan@gmail.com

The current unprecedented urbanization provides China an opportunity to rethink about its urban definition and reconstruct the scenary for the future. While as an independent, indigenous growth architecture, the traditional Chinese courtyard building architecture represents the main feature of the ancient Chinese cities and architectures. It establishes the harmonious relationship between the different living elements, satisfies spirit demands and aesthetic sense, and in a certain sense, becomes one of the the criteria to evaluate the living quality. The spatial essences which are carried by the unique architectural language not only could represent the Chinese identities but also could be the best instruments for people to deal with the issue of spatial organization and construction in contemporary circumstances.

Keywords: Chinese courtyard building; Chinese architectural essence; contemporary strategies

1. Introduction Chinese courtyard building architecture acts as the main spatial language in the long history of China for thousands years. It is the basic unit to form the general connected architectural fabric which coordinate the different elements of the urban environment.

In the current process of urbanization, the contemporary Chinese cities under construction are facing many problems, because the unreasonable developmental mode ignores some necessary organic connection. In the meanwhile, we realize that the development and construction also provide China an opportunity to rethink and redefine the new and suitable urban structure and architectural spaces, and the traditional courtyard building is the most effective instrument to improve the living quality and achieve the sustainable development.

Hence, at the beginning, the article would like to make a brief introduction about the Chinese traditional courtyard building, especially to show its significances in establishing the relationship between the different elements as an integrated architecture. Then the article will analyze the problems which emerge during the current Chinese urbanization on the urban landscape, and propose some strategies by using the courtyard building as an effective instrument to improve them. Through the case of Chinese courtyard building, the article illuminates that the traditional architecture could do the great benefits on evolutionary development of the urban landscape in the contemporary time and the future.

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2. Chinese courtyard building - an integrated architecture Because of the geographical restriction, the Chinese tradition architecture formed an independent system and developed in parallel with the Western architectural system. Base on the agricultural civilization, in order to get the harmonious interaction with the circumstance, the Chinese courtyard building architecture is a type which could represent the relationship and transforms into a very rich system with series of various types. During the thousands years of development, some predominant essences are always been inherited, and will do benefit for the future.

Design with the nature China as a longstanding agriculture-based country, the nature elements played crucial roles in the process of generation and development of its architecture, while dealing with the relations between human and nature was also an important task of the architecture. The Chinese courtyard building was the best explanation of the people’s consciousness feeling and respecting the nature.

Tian Ren He Yi (Harmony between nature and Human beings), the traditional Chinese philosophy, indicated that people believed that Nature and Human beings were integrated: man was not the conqueror of the nature, but one part of it. While according to Tian Yuan Di Fang (Round heaven - Square Earth), the ancient understanding of the geometrical pattern of the universe, the courtyard building got its shape: the residential rooms on the boundary to set the quadrate enclosure with an open space in the middle. People lived in a courtyard house as to integrate into the nature. Life and nature linked and interacted through the architecture.

Figure 1. Diagram of Tian Yuan Di Fang and the courtyard building architecture

Furthermore, when constructing the buildings, people would like to adapt it perfectly to the local natural geographic ambiance and climate, and finally formed the special courtyard building fabric especially for the certain place. Therefore the courtyard building architecture has got various kinds of types due to the different natural conditions all over the country while sharing the same identity.

Arrange for the society Agricultural production and labor need some kind of organization and order, which gradually evolved into the basic rules of society. Jing Tian Zhi (Square-fields system) is an ancient farming system, which has a similar diagram with the Nine Squares Grid. This kind of division of farm lands was deriving from the daily agricultural production and life which surrounded the well as the water supply. The center grid was the public area while the surroundings were more private reflecting the link between individual and collective.

Confucian advocated that the social organization should follow the laws of nature showed the certain order, since people and society were nothing but the replica of the natural spirit while the man and nature were interlinked. Ritual institution, as the theories of Confucian-based philosophy, is the most important guide to regulate people's behaviors and thinkings to organize the society. It enriched the theory of

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square-fields system, and aroused the ancient Chinese urban planning principles more than 3000 years before, in Zhou li - Kao Gong Ji (Rites of Zhou - Book of Diverse Crafts1).

Figure 2. Diagram of Jing tian zhi, Capital city in Book of Diverse Craft; Basic structure of the Capital city

Under the influence of the ritual institution, following the diagram, the social organization showed a hierarchical order system from running the home to running the country: the single courtyard building which contain the single family, was the basic unite to constitute the district, then the city, and then the whole country. This structural system made the urban fabric looked like a huge continuous single architecture. It expressed a flexible scale - micro to macro or vise versa, and the relations between each part were organized and adjusted in accordance with the needs of the social and living order. Together with the principles of nature, the organization of courtyard building, as an artificial media, integrated people’s life with the society and the nature.

Figure 3. Cang’an city, the capital of Tang Dynasty (AD 618-907)

A general connected urban fabric The courtyard building architecture was constructed by the module system. It made the building easy to be “installed” and flexible for different usage. It could be utilized singly or in groups, for both public and private functions. Its layout was born for residence, but also well adapted and developed for palace, temple, mausoleum, government office, school, and so on.

Rites of Zhou, Book of Rites and the Etiquette & Rites, were the three ancient ritual texts (the "Three Rites") listed among the classics of Confucianism. They were the theoretical writings of the ancient ritual and etiquette culture, and made the most authoritative records and explanations for the ancient ritual institution.

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Figure 4. Combinations of courtyard buildings: Series, parallel and nested connection

According to its extensive adaptability, Chinese courtyard building architecture was the main spatial language in the long history of China for thousands years. It formed various architectural fabric. From single building to the whole city then to a large region, from one single family to the whole society, from the residential usage to other public functions, from the individual life to the organization of social and natural environment, the courtyard building architecture was able to coordinate the relations among different factors, and formed an organic integrated system.

3. Rethinking the contemporary Chinese urban landscape Entering the 21st century, twenty years after the Chinese Reforming and Opening-up, the development of China got the abundant achievements. Furthermore, a series of important international events, such as hosting the Olympic games in 2008, provided China an opportunity to speed up the development and urbanization. Nevertheless, the current developmental mode has many problems. In order to achieve the sustainable development, the appropriate new urban landscape should be reconsidered.

About the historical architectural context Different from the western architecture history, after the modern architecture movement, the backward China has never reached a uniform consensus on the choices between western classic, western modern, or Chinese traditional architecture. What is the Chinese modern architecture? The performance of the local culture has always been a popular topic in Chinese architecture circle.

Since 1850s, although the pursuit of modern and Chinese architecture caused many experiments with Chinese characters, they are mainly superficial imitation of the traditional building. We believe that the search of the Chinese traditional urban context should start from the reflection on architectural spaces rather than the simple imitation of the appearance. The structural and spatial strategies which inherent in the traditional cities and buildings should be explored as the Chinese architectural essences, that their practical value will be showed also today.

About the urban frame The ancient Chinese urban frame payed more attention on the inhabitants’ life. The urban structure was based on the courtyard buildings which could provide the comfortable living spaces. The roads were set according to the layout of the buildings, and were the public living spaces for the commercial and communication activities. The slow traffic mode ensured the adequate interactions within people, and between people and living facilities. The architecture helped people to enjoy the living spaces.

While the current Chinese urban frames consider more about the activity of cars. The urban planning system, from master plan, district planning, to regulatory plan, adopt the strict road network hierarchical system. The urban fabric is decided by the roads and its dimension, both roads and blocks in between, are much bigger than before. The buildings, no matter new or old, have to accommodate the urban street

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network; and the strict planning regulations also serve the roads. The Automotive City is produced. In which, the broad street grids cut off the connections between the buildings; the surviving historic districts are isolated by the new road frames,... The original urban vitality is losing.

Figure 5. Henry Murphy, 100#building Ginling Women's University, 1922 (The fake Chinese structure is the decoration on the appearance)

Figure 6. The comparison of the urban fabric

About the high density fabric The high-density development is an irreversible tendency worldwide. Especially in China, the problem of high density is supposed to be solved during the process of urbanization. Hence, the form of traditional courtyard building has been abandoned because it’s considered to have low density. While, on the other hand, since the 1950s, the approaches of improving density usually are constructing the high-rise buildings, enlarging the depth of each building, and minimizing the interval distance between them. In this way, the layouts of the quarter usually apply as more as possible the slab apartments, or point blocks, forming a image of the Radiant City. These unwise measures which are very popular, plus the irrational urban planning regulation, lead to the current regretful Chinese cities’ images: only high density, no living quality.

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Figure 7. Monotonous slab apartments in parallel rows, Shijiazhuang

About the urban architecture The current regulation and codes of planning leads to the City of Objects where the urban architectures are isolated in the city. Yung Ho Chang once published an article titled City of Objects to question the way of transforming the horizontal city in the recent decades: the tower-like architecture are selected with no relations to the surrounding environment. And he predicted: “when the collection of objects complete, the City of Objects or rather the city disappears. Only the objects remain.� (Yung Ho Chang, 2005) The courtyard buildingbased continuous, harmonious, organic and horizontal cities, have been cut apart by the irrelevant and arrogant buildings, eventually turn to be Inorganic Cities.

Figure 8. Shanghai Lujiazui, City of Objects

About the recourse and environment For decades, the urban planning of Chinese cities has separated the functions: working, living, recreation are put in different districts/plots through functional zoning, results in simplistic urban blocks. Therefore, Large volume of traffic generated, caused the extravagance of energy and resources. Some implementations to develop low-carbon and green communities have been carried out, but they are mainly the high-tech green energy facilities applied in the buildings. The approaches of sustainable development should be considered and planned in the phase of city’s master plan; a rational strategy for urban planning, mixed-use community, can reduce the occurrence of unnecessary trips, save the recourses and do benefit to the environment. And the enclosure of Chinese traditional courtyard building architecture is the suitable reference to achieve the strategy.

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4. Reshape the future city The sustainable strategies of the courtyard building architecture for the more reasonable urban landscape are definitely not copying directly the original form, but utilizing its essences or advantages for the current construction of living environment, and translating these properties into some techniques and instruments to deal with the new problems. These techniques are the inheritance of the traditional culture, respecting the local inhabitants’s opinion about the high quality living spaces, and in the meanwhile, meet the requirements in the new context.

Return to the courtyard building style One important reason of emerging the terrible outcome is the negative developmental mode destroy the connection between the elements. The way of spatial organization of the courtyard building could be used as the effective instrument to solve the problem of spaces arrangement, to relink the necessary elements, especially to rebuild the relationship with nature. Nature is a vital factor in the ancient Chinese cities.

When people organize the living spaces with courtyard buildings, the introduction of the natural elements could help to weaken the direct conflict between the artificial construction and the natural environment, to emphasis the organic constitution.

In order to improve the quality of contemporary urban landscape, the courtyard building was first popular in the residential buildings, some projects imitate the spatial arrangement of the folk houses, for example the Vanke Fifth Garden (2004) in Shenzhen. It dosen’t mean to make the copies, but follow the traditional spatial principle to coordinate living and natural spaces, enrich the living ambiance and provide diverse experiences for the inhabitants, eventually avoid the monotonous image shown as the prevailing slab apartment. Although the principles are from the past, the architectures are all construct by the updated technologies.

Figure 9. Ancient villages in southern Anhui (Xidi) & Vanke Fifth Garden, Wang Ge, Shenzhen, 2004

Figure 10. Ancient painting of Huancuitang Garden & Liantang Town hall, Atelier Z+, Shanghai, 2010

The strategy is also adopt in more and more projects of public building, like office, museum, hotel,etc., and form a method of “living mode” oriented design, for example Liantang Town hall (2010) in Shanghai.

In these buildings, courtyards display the characteristics of nature, organizations, and public communications, produces a relaxed living atmosphere for public buildings.

By using the courtyard form, all kinds of architecture in the city could be represent by one language, compose a harmonious uniform system.

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Represent the communities The traditional courtyard buildings are isogenous, sharing the basic identity. They adapted with the local conditions to enrich the typology when they diffused in the history, which made the courtyard building could meet the different social groups’ requirements by changing into different types and scales.

Therefore, by using the proper approaches to compose the appropriate courtyard buildings could serve the relevant society and its lifestyle.

For example, the single courtyard building near Shanghai area is small and usually serve a big family in group, while the dimension of single Hakka enclosure in Fujian Province is much big which contain the whole family inside together. Urban Tulou (2008) is a case that trying to utilize the Hakka enclosure in Fujian to contain a small but complete society for the social vulnerable groups.

Figure 11. Vernaculer Hakka house in Fujian Province & Urban Tulou, URBANUS, Guangdong Nanhai, 2008

The courtyard buildings could provide mixed-use spaces to form different kinds of community to connect the individual and society in the new by certain approaches. In the meanwhile, the multifunctional community which reduced the traffic and more compact could be proposed.

High density, but livable spaces Beijing Image quarter (2003), is a high rise building community with livable spaces by using the courtyard enclosure. The architect surveyed the historic downtown’s urban fabric and transplanted the enclosure organization of traditional courtyard building into this large dimension area.

The high-density development is an evitable choice for Chinese cities. But high density does not only mean high-rise building. In fact, to improve the land use efficiency and environmental quality is the main objective for Compact city.

Figure 12. The historic downtown of Beijing & Beijing Image quate, Otto Steidle+9.3 Group, Beijing, 2003

Although the Chinese courtyard building architecture was regarded as low-rise, horizontal unit and not suitable for current high-density urban development, it indeed a high density typology. Compared with the detached house, it has more efficiency of land utilization. Both Chinese (Shang Kuo, Yang Ling-yu, 1982/05) and western research have proved this point, for example, in the research Towards an Urban Renaissance leading by Richard Rogers (Rogers R., 1999), three different layout of a quarter with the same density have been compared, and the enclosure one could help to create a vital community with wellserviced facilities and diverse open spaces.

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The flexible structure Chinese traditional buildings are constructed by the module system. Therefore, follow the hierarchy, the grid fabric of Chinese ancient cities are also formed by equivalent modules(the courtyard buildings). The grid could be interpreted as a solid network of buildings and also a void one of the courtyard spaces and the streets. That it is, the standardized component set the connected frame while the interior spaces could realize the individual and customized design. The industrialization and standardized production is the irresistible tendency. In order to attempt to change the banal urban fabric with monotonous spatial images like the rows of slab blocks, the attribute of the courtyard fabric could be used to keep the connection and personality.

Figure 13. The developmental mode of Chinese ancient city, the grid diagram extract from the Chinese courtyard fabric

Figure 14. Shanghai shared housing(idea), Kuu Architects, 2009 Figure 15. Qianjiang Times (Vertical courtyard apartments), Amateur Architecture Studio, Hangzhou, 2007

For example, in Kuu Architects’s project, Shanghai shared housing (2009), uses the standard space modules, as the equivalent courtyard buildings, mix and connect together to increase the land use efficiency, and provide the appartement containing different number of the units and combinations to different family.

Wang Shu’s project, the Vertical Courtyard Apartments (Qian-jiang Times) (2006), form a vertical courtyard-like connection which imitate the local traditional living spaces. Each family has a aerial yard where they could decorate by themself to show their personalities.

5. Conclusion The Chinese courtyard building plays the essential role in the composition of Chinese urban landscape. Its system generated and evolved spontaneously according to the Chinese ideologies and coordinated with other related elements to build the integrated system. The landscape of the courtyard building fabric represent the attributes of integration, hierarchy and adaptability. The landscape displays the Chinese

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identity. And the essences which are extracted from the past urban language could encourage the future definitions.

The current Chinese urbanization pays more attentions on the economic interest, while the honest caring about the inhabitants’ life has been put aside. Some beneficial connections have been destroyed and some new relations are appear ahead. At this very moment, the past gives people the ideas to fix the problems and link the new newborn. The strategies representing the essence of the traditional architecture, keep the local cultural identity, accommodate the inhabitants custom and aesthesis, and are adopted by the update techniques. The solutions are new creations, and advanced evolutions of the indigenous landscape. When facing the future, the new urban language is under discussing, visualizing the past could help us to promote the imagination.

References Yung Ho Chang, (2005), Zuo wen ben (Yung Ho Chang Writes), Shenghuo-Dushu-Xinzhi Joint Publishing Company, Beijing.

Rogers R., (1999), Towards an Urban Renaissance, Final Report of the Urban Task Force.

Shang Kuo, Yang Ling-yu (1982/05), Chuantong tingyuanshi zhuzhai yu dicing gaomidu (Traditional Courtyard houses and Low-rise High-density), in Jianzhu Xuebao (Architectural Journal).

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BY PLANUM. THE JOURNAL OF URBANISM ISSN 1723-0993 | N. 27, VOL. 2 [2013] WWW.PLANUM.NET