The Next Layer | Cecilia Maria Roberta Luschi

cecilia maria roberta luschi yair varon

The Next Layer

La serie di pubblicazioni scientifiche Ricerche | architettura, design, territorio ha l’obiettivo di diffondere i risultati delle ricerche e dei progetti realizzati dal Dipartimento di Architettura DIDA dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze in ambito nazionale e internazionale.

Ogni volume è soggetto ad una procedura di accettazione e valutazione qualitativa basata sul giudizio tra pari affidata al Comitato Scientifico Editoriale del Dipartimento di Architettura. Tutte le pubblicazioni sono inoltre open access sul Web, per favorire non solo la diffusione ma anche una valutazione aperta a tutta la comunità scientifica internazionale.

Il Dipartimento di Architettura dell’Università di Firenze promuove e sostiene questa collana per offrire un contributo alla ricerca internazionale sul progetto sia sul piano teorico-critico che operativo.

The Research | architecture, design, and territory series of scientific publications has the purpose of disseminating the results of national and international research and project carried out by the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence (DIDA).

The volumes are subject to a qualitative process of acceptance and evaluation based on peer review, which is entrusted to the Scientific Publications Committee of the Department of Architecture.

Furthermore, all publications are available on an open-access basis on the Internet, which not only favors their diffusion, but also fosters an effective evaluation from the entire international scientific community.

The Department of Architecture of the University of Florence promotes and supports this series in order to offer a useful contribution to international research on architectural design, both at the theoretico-critical and operative levels.

ricerche | architettura design territorio

ricerche | architettura design territorio

Coordinatore | Scientific coordinator Saverio Mecca | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy Comitato scientifico | Editorial board Elisabetta Benelli | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Marta Berni | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Stefano Bertocci | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Antonio Borri | Università di Perugia, Italy; Molly Bourne | Syracuse University, USA; Andrea Campioli | Politecnico di Milano, Italy; Miquel Casals Casanova | Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Spain; Marguerite Crawford | University of California at Berkeley, USA; Rosa De Marco | ENSA Paris-LaVillette, France; Fabrizio Gai | Istituto Universitario di Architettura di Venezia, Italy; Javier Gallego Roja | Universidad de Granada, Spain; Giulio Giovannoni | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Robert Levy| Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel; Fabio Lucchesi | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Pietro Matracchi | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Saverio Mecca | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Camilla Mileto | Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain | Bernhard Mueller | Leibniz Institut Ecological and Regional Development, Dresden, Germany; Libby Porter | Monash University in Melbourne, Australia; Rosa Povedano Ferré | Universitat de Barcelona, Spain; Pablo RodriguezNavarro | Universidad Politecnica de Valencia, Spain; Luisa Rovero | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; José-Carlos Salcedo Hernàndez | Universidad de Extremadura, Spain; Marco Tanganelli | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Maria Chiara Torricelli | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Ulisse Tramonti | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Andrea Vallicelli | Università di Pescara, Italy; Corinna Vasič | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy; Joan Lluis Zamora i Mestre | Universitat Politécnica de Catalunya, Spain; Mariella Zoppi | Università degli Studi di Firenze, Italy

cecilia maria roberta luschi yair varon presentazione di

giuseppe de luca

The Next Layer

Il volume è l’esito di un progetto di ricerca condotto dal Dipartimento di Architettura dell’Università degli Studi di Firenze.

La pubblicazione è stata oggetto di una procedura di accettazione e valutazione qualitativa basata sul giudizio tra pari affidata dal Comitato Scientifico del Dipartimento DIDA con il sistema di blind review.

Tutte le pubblicazioni del Dipartimento di Architettura DIDA sono open access sul web, favorendo una valutazione effettiva aperta a tutta la comunità scientifica internazionale.

Le immagini a tutta pagina che anticipano ogni capitolo sono le rappresentazioni grafiche dei progetti svolti negli anni 2018 e 2019 dello SPACE Project. Faranno parte dell’esposizione della Biennale di Venezia 2021.

The full-page images, that anticipate each chapter, are the graphic representations of the projects carried out in the years 2018 and 2019 of the S.P.A.C.E. Project. They will be part of the 2021 Venice Biennale exhibition.

in copertina Rappresentazione cartografica del Cardo e del Decumano nella città storica di Firenze e di Gerusalemme a cura di Sara Masi

progetto grafico

didacommunicationlab Dipartimento di Architettura Università degli Studi di Firenze Susanna Cerri Federica Aglietti

didapress Dipartimento di Architettura Università degli Studi di Firenze via della Mattonaia, 8 Firenze 50121 © 2021 ISBN 978-88-3338-149-7

Stampato su carta di pura cellulosa Fedrigoni Arcoset

indice | contents

Preface 07 Giuseppe De Luca Introduction 09 Beni R. Levi The uncanny way of architecture Itzik Elhadif

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Thoughts and ideas regarding Israely architecture from a time generated point of view Michael Rona

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La storia è libertà History is freedom Fabio Fabbrizzi

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The Cable Car to the Western Wall David Cassuto

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Architettura: Diversa ma non Estranea Architecture: Different but not Unknown Cecilia Maria Roberta Luschi

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Fascist-Era Built Heritage: A Walk through the City of Forlì Yair Varon

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Immagine urbana di un patrimonio universale Urban landscape of a universal heritage Laura Aiello

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“Lux veritatis, vita memoriae”. Quando l’architettura parla “Lux veritatis, vita memoriae”. When Architecture speaks Marta Zerbini

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Biennale di Venezia 2018 Solomon Project

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Bibliography 139

preface Prof. Arch. Giuseppe De Luca

Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Architettura DIDA

The S.P.A.C.E. Project is a bridge between native Mediterranean cultures; it is a bridge between two cities which have deeply affected the human history; it is a bridge between academic realities who share the universal sensible approach to the project and the idea that young students and researchers, facing international realities, have to pursue and practice this approach.

A bridge is not only a link between cultures, but it is the mixer of cultures with the aim to bring out the differences and affinities, and also to make new shared shapes of space projects and projects in the space. The seminar, of which some parts are described in the book, it’s a wonderful experience to learn and to be familiar with professors and students with two different cultures, traditions and temperaments, as well as an opportunity to try out new practices and techniques in art and architecture.

The Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence sharing this spirit, has approved, pursued and supported this project, with the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence. Conversing and working together are one of the most important opportunities which could be made by freeminds, to accustom new generations to the comparison curiosity and to sharing the own experiences and stories.

The enormous historic, artistic, cultural and environmental heritage, as well as the contemporary lifestyles diffused in the two cities of the project, has been the place where to explore this conversation and where to ask ourselves how, in this period of globalization and of justin-time informations, working with people around a table is essential.

If architecture is the biggest expression of the human being and creativity, exploring and sharing it together around intercultural tables is one of the most important development moments which could be offered by the teacher community to their students. For this reason I’m grateful to all of the teachers who, working together, have allowed this.

introduction Prof. Arch. Beni R. Levy Dean, School of Architecture Ariel University of Israel

The S.P.A.C.E. Project is an example of successful collaboration between international academic institutions for the sake of sharing cultural values through architectural theory and design.

The project initiated in 2014 and enhancing every year since, is enabled by the efforts of teachers and students of architecture of Ariel University, University of Florence and the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence. This mutual venture, which take place in Jerusalem and in Florence, is a great platform for its participants to learn, explore, experience, and express their thoughts and Ideas about how to integrate architecturally within the delicate urban fabric of these two world importance historical cities.

Laying a new layer of contemporary culture is a delicate task, respecting the layers of previous generations, while at the same time expressing, gently, proudly and clearly, local as well as global innovative contemporary ideas, so that it will be meaningful, beautiful, and hopefully last the test of time and place. This is extremely important especially for ancient cities as lively organisms.

The international thematic seminar is also a profound experience for Italian and Israeli students, gathering and collaborating in mixed teams, of different and mutual approaches, communicating through the language of Architecture and Art, creating as well social and professional ties and friendships.

The honorable publication in front of us is a result and a testimony of the quality work done by the students and the teachers during the fifth seminar held in 2019, manifested in their architectural design projects and products, both for a Center of Modern Art in Florence and for a Scholar Guest House in Jerusalem.

I congratulate all the participating members and partners, in Italy and in Israel, for their inspiring work as documented in this book, and I wish and hope that these yearly seminars will proceed successfully also in the coming years, as a mutual way to enrich our lives.

the uncanny way of architecture academic researc vs design intelligence Itzik Elhadif

School of Architecture Ariel University of Israel

Every architectural school must periodically question itself and review what it has inherited from previous generations by asking the following questions: What is architecture? What is its significance? How should it be taught? How should it be made? How are topics chosen, and why is one topic chosen over another? The question of what is essential and what is secondary in the curriculum is hardly ever concerned with purely technical matters. It often arises from significant changes in the worlds of theory and practice, relating not only to the necessity of a certain topic but also to preparing students for reality.

If you ask the faculty members – especially those in administrative positions – about certain types of academic content, they will most likely say they are essential and that removing them would be unthinkable. Sometimes we do things simply because we are used to doing them, because they have become habit or, perhaps, because they create a sense of continuity with the past. The question is not just what the topics are and in what measure each should be taught, but also what the relations between theory, practice and research should be, and to what degree they prepare us for technological and cultural changes.

Still, to me, the methods and tools of the creative act that integrate existing practical knowledge and research remain something of a puzzle. The obvious fact is that the lecturers want their students to study and appreciate architecture, its inherent applicability, its intellectual properties and the beauty it embodies.

Practical Skills Versus the Discovery of New Knowledge: Linear Versus “Open Source” Process An architecture student acquires theoretical knowledge as well as professional skills. Most schools practice more or less the same linear studio stages even if the order and combination of each year is different. The first year constitutes the fundamentals, the basics of design practice and thinking. The second year covers the first stages of planning and designing. The third year usually includes more complex problems, such as urban scale or the demands of multi-layered

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Figure 1 John Hejduk “Wall House” (1973) originally designed by John Hejduk in the 1970s.

Build in 2001 in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands.

thinking. The fourth year integrates the previous phases and culminates in the final project.

Though summarized somewhat superficially, this is the normal progression. Each stage consists of the development and acquisition of existing professional knowledge, skills and conventions and the attainment of new forms of knowledge, usually understood as research. It seems

the uncanny way of architecture • itzik elhadif

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Figure 2 elevation and plan of “The House without Rooms”

by Raimund Abraham (1971)

that there is a difference between the discourse of architecture as providing solutions or addressing problems and a more integrative, though not necessarily Aristotelian, way of thinking. In other words, it is the difference between solving a problem and reformulating it into a new way of thinking.

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In some instances, architecture is perceived as a broader field, as a means of examining things and not just constructing them. There are, for example, John Hejduk’s (Hejduk, Kellner, Steketee, 2007) fascination with the genesis of symbols and his reference to “the house” in the wall house (1968/1973) (Fig. 1) or Raimund Abraham’s (Ambrham, 1996) spatial concepts of dwelling in his house without rooms (1996) (Fig. 2). Quite a few architects inquire into space, walls, shelter, dwelling, light and other aspects of architecture.

In the course of their studies students encounter instructors and new bodies of knowledge at two main levels: the first is the level of knowledge and experience of the instructor, acquired through research and practice. The instructor is perceived as an expert advisor through which students acquire existing knowledge.

This is first order knowledge: Knowlege —> Instructor Research —> Student Second order knowledge is the result of collaborative work between the instructor and the student in the context of the studio, which leads to the creation of new knowledge through design research: New Knowledge = Instructor Research + Student Watzlawick, Weakland, Fisch (1979) distinguish between these two types of new knowledge.

They discuss the phenomenon of duration, the process of changing human actions, how change occurs and how one can initiate and execute it. They distinguish between spontaneous processes, first order change processes and second order change processes.

The ‘first order’, which seems to be intended mainly for the student, is new knowledge within a given framework. The new knowledge of the “second order” originates from outside a given framework, intended for the student and instructor alike. Though certainly every good project involves ‘thinking outside the box’, the curriculum is built on a scale that varies between the acquisition of recognized knowledge, professional skills and mediation (all of the first order) and reflections about them (of the second order). The dominance of each of the orders is evident at the end of the student’s process of architectural training. The less work on skills, the more room remains for new knowledge, and vice versa.

In today’s generation the question remains, to what extent does the critical discourse practiced in the studio become inherent in the student’s practice? Or, in the words of Brunelleschi, to what extent can a person enter the world of architecture “with his own voice”? Quite a few students learn that on an academic level architecture is limited to arguments based mostly on an arbitrary authority – i.e. the lecturers – and not necessarily applicable to life outside the studio. During conversations with instructors I sometimes hear «I am not a theoretician but a practitioner». This

the uncanny way of architecture • itzik elhadif

betrays the prejudice that if you engage in theory your creativity is inferior and vice versa. Needless to say, it would be ideal to integrate the two. One can always practice mindless art or artless theory, and one should beware of both.

Moreover, as one thinks about methodology and studio work, one wonders if there might be a way to replace the linear curriculum with a set of changing problems posed by a mentor or adviser. These studies, as well as the studio work, can be an ‘open source’ process, a certain democratization of information. Rather than organizing architectural study in a linear hierarchy of problems of size and complexity, each with particular and critical fields of interest, architecture could become a means of creation and existence. It is, if you will, thinking of architecture as an array of issues conceptualized by and open to communication with other intellectual fields. Alternately, it may be described as a less centralized system that deals with changes and the creation of new, second order knowledge. By operating outside a given framework from the outset, the student finds his or her own way of approaching the world of meaning in architecture.

Interaction Between Academia and Practice and the Problematic of Defining the Act of Creation Meaningful professional dialog is necessary in our time, characterized as it is by growing social conflict and uncertainty. A question worth asking is: What kinds of interaction exist between academia and practice? Since the nature of practice is usually the realization of ideas and existing methodologies, I would like to suggest that, despite the prevailing view, the role of the academia – beyond training and imparting skills – is to provoke innovative research approaches, theoretical issues and concepts, even if they cannot be directly translated into concrete results (previously referred to as the second order). Academia is there to open doors of understanding and provide tools for asking challenging questions, which in the long term may support practice. In this manner, however, part of the learning activity is not directly purposeful, since it undermines the contemporary neoliberal rationale that research should lean toward the practical.

While in many other fields research is conducted in a lab – a bubble that exists trans-nationally, closed and inaccessible to anyone who is not an expert – in architecture, our ‘lab’ is the studio.

Our language is not ‘scientific’, and it is theoretically available to everyone. More importantly, the role we presume to play is not just to reveal new information but also to create a discourse and product with value to society as a whole. Since we question cultural and spatial baggage and perceptions of reality, we reflect, through material production, a change to cultural aspirations.

I argue that architectural research— and for that matter humanistic and social scientific research —is as valid as research in the natural sciences. Even if architectural research in particular moves

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Fig.3: Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1895) Fig. 4: This particular photo of Pollock is one of the more widely used.

Namuth’s photos given by far the best view of Pollock’s techniques, which are covered in the article (photo by H. Namuth)

slowly and, therefore, is perceived to lack purpose in the practical, classic sense, it is a form of research that asks not only how to create a place but also how to create meaning, how to establish space and reality by means that cannot necessarily be explained by pure logic or scientific rules.

Unlike other types of research, a characteristic of research in architecture is the acceptance of a certain degree of subjectivity as a tool for measurement and critical analysis. Research in the creative fields usually aims to examine things in order to accumulate knowledge based on practice and on decision-making. During the creative process a combination of tools and content is ‘selected’ from a range of infinite possibilities (∞ = 1).

The presentation and documentation of these selections at every stage, alongside the insights obtained and applied, constitute state-of-the-art research. Since we often put more emphasis on the final response to a research question than on the process that led to it, we are usually inconsistent about that process.

I want to go back to the meaning of ‘selection’. Some argue that intuition can be used as a method of selection and recognition of a wide and often unexpected range of modules (Topal, 2006).

For example, Rafael Moneo in his essay on Typology (Moneo,1978) argues that composition is the main mechanism for thinking and decision-making in the spatial arena.

the uncanny way of architecture • itzik elhadif

Based on increased recognition of the limitations of the methodological tools at our disposal, I believe that what we do is produce a hybrid of positivist and interpretive worldviews. This constitutes an interim mediation between diagrams and intuition, or what I call a sort of ‘learned intuition.’

Alternately, we may perform a decision-making process that aims to be completely rational. In historical examples, this would be akin to the Italian rationalists or the extreme German functionalists. A relatively more recent case is Joshua Ramus’s description of OMA’s design process for the Seattle Central Library (Ramus, 2007). He describes the process as rational to the extreme, even bordering on the absurd: a development process that had no clearly stamped author.

It appears that the purer this method is, the more easily it could be categorized as a classical research methodology.

However, in creative work the process maybe more varied. This may be illustrated by comparing one of Cézanne’s Sainte-Victoire paintings (Fig. 3) to Jackson Pollock’s explorations of color fields (Fig. 4). Cézanne paints the same object over and over again (about 80 times) in order to refine and test the method. Pollock completes a piece of work in one fell swoop evoking an automated act of creation.

In the act of creation in general − and architectural creation in particular − there is from the Latin intuir, meaning knowledge from within. Intuition was generally avoided by self-respecting scientists, who feared accusations of engaging in new age speculation rather than serious science.

However, contemporary cognitive scientists consider intuition as a set of non-conscious cognitive and affective processes. The outcome of these processes is often difficult to articulate and is not based on deliberate thinking. But it is nevertheless real and (sometimes) effective (Pigliucci,2012). If the human mind is compared to a lake into which different streams flow, some of these streams originate from internal springs but most of them come from external sources. The lake is formed from their convergence in a delicate balance of creativity.

Learned intuition is in an intermediate state and most closely describes how we operate. This type of intuition comes from habit and experience. In fact, it comes from insight based on information, even if it is not always possible to follow the mental process. As Pascal said «The heart has its reasons which reason knows not ». Learned intuition is situated in the intermediate area of different world perceptions. In Eye and Mind (Maurick, 1964), Merleau-Ponty looks into an intermediate area between the sensory and the intellectual, between the inside and the outside, between the subjective and the objective. In other words, learned intuition originates in an uncanny place that is difficult to grasp with certainty. This intermediate area is a concrete field, Merleau-Ponty argues, although it is invisible to the eye. It is a place in which wonder occurs, turning the world into something meaningful and substantial. It is where one must recognize

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Architectural Thought

Practice Architectural

Architectural

Practice

Research

Teaching

Thought

Research

Architectural Teaching

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Arrow scheme 1 and arrow scheme 2.

that the occult is an integral part of the unconcealed − the ‘visible of the invisible’, if you will.

A work of architecture contains countless fields of information that function simultaneously, the boundaries and the knowledge they contain merge into one another. It is reminiscent of Konstantin Stanislavsky’s system for training actors in which one does not play a character but is the character. The actor must therefore ask «What does the character want to be?» This is somewhat to a brick: “What do you want, brick?” Another example of Practicesimilar to Louis Kahn’s question Thought merging may be seen in the in Parade written by Jean Cocteau, composed by Erik Satie and with costume and scenery design by Pablo Picasso. Parade is not exclusively theatre, painting or music. It is rather a hybrid of all three. Similarly, architecture is a performance composed of many Teaching Research fields, hence the difficulty in measuring it coherently. Here we may recall another quote from Kahn, “A great building must begin with the unmeasurable, must go through measurable means when it is being designed, and in the end must be unmeasurable” (Saul-Wurmann, 1986).

I understand architectural research as the ability to engage in methodical reflection on the world. It is a way to revisit the past, while understanding the intuitive, intellectual, aesthetic and social mechanisms that activate us. Attempting to demonstrate this notion structurally, I would say that the core of architectural action takes place between architectural thinking and teaching, on the one hand, and practice and research, on the other (arrow scheme 1). These reciprocal relationships can be understood through an even more complex three-dimensional form.

The phenomenon of architectural action is located in the space between two rings, one inside the other (arrow scheme 2).

the uncanny way of architecture • itzik elhadif

Fig. 1 Wall House 2, originally designed by John Hejduk in the 1970s. Build in 2001 in the city of Groningen, the Netherlands. (Author: Wenkbrauwalbatros) Fig. 2 Elevation and plan of The House without Rooms by Raimund Abraham (1971). Source: Architectural Design Unit at Greenwich University run by Caroline Rabourdin and Luke Olsen Fig. 3 Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (ca. 1887), Courtauld Institute of Art collection,National Gallery of Art source Fig. 4 This particular photo by Namuth is one of the more widely used Namuth’s photos of Pollock given by far the best view of Pollock’s techniques, which are covered in the article

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thoughts and ideas regarding israeli architecture Michael Rona

Senior lecturer, School of Architecture Ariel University of Israel

Thoughts and ideas regarding Israeli architecture from a time generated point of view 1. Civilization is a collective effort taken by people of all cultures and generations since the dawn of humanity. Every generation in every era adds its layer to the never-ending strive to the new - presenting its unique agendas, ideas, values and conflicts that are manifested in texts, art and of course in the physical world – the built environment. Mighty collisions of ideas, religions and politics are evident centuries later in architectural styles, musical genres, scientific discoveries, philosophy and literature. The truths of today were earlier centuries’ conflicts. The accumulation of generations’ creation results in the fascinating conglomerate known as human civilization, evident in one of the greatest human achievements – the city.

2. The City is the physical embodiment of civilization. Consisting of multiple human creations and subject only to human rules and logic using man-made technology – challenging nature.

The city carries the signs, prizes and scars of history – layers of generations’ values, hopes, passion and sorrow – cultural layers and physical layers. Like geological layers unravelling the history of the earth and the evolution of life. Humanity has created both physical and metaphysical layers – all evident in the city.

3. Culture manifests its layers in texts as well as works of art recognizable in their historic context. Artistic styles, ideas presented in words as well as useful technology carry the DNA of the former stages of development – like reminiscence of ancient life forms existing in the living organism. These are not physical but abstract layers existing in a human collective memory nourished by education and myth as well as subconscious experience, and so – the term “layer” in this context may be referred to as a metaphor as well as a descriptive one.

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4. Physical Environment carries these reminiscences like actual layers – material evidence of former times and eras – the oldest buried, hidden and hinted upon the city’s seen surface. Ancient layers revealed by archeology and more recent ones exist within buildings and streets. Most European cities and towns consist of many layers built on top of each other, naturally co-existing for their inhabitants. They all enrich the physical environment as well as culture and consciousness.

These layers carry the blessing of culture as well as the burden of ages of sacred values and artifacts that might slow down ultimately cease the development of the most celebrated cities in the world.

It is quite impossible to add new built elements to Rome, Paris Centre and Prague, and so these magnificent environments might stagnate as they carry no reminder of contemporary culture.

5. Cultural Environment is also formed gradually, as each layer adds a new set of forms, values and knowledge. As the world goes through a rapid urbanization process, new cities – free of the burden of former layers – emerge and strive around the globe, creating a mass of efficient and functional cities carrying hardly any cultural depth. Modernism – as a basic paradigm which celebrates the future and the present as a step in the pursuit of the next phase of mankind, takes no interest in former layers due to the basic assumption that the past is irrelevant. Modernistic cities – the Chandigarh architype – are clean, efficient, non-historic environments representing an idea of human logic enabling progress in its scientific sense. It is only natural that a new society as Israel – emerging at the golden era of Modernism – the second half of the twentieth century – would create its cities as modern environments – free of former layers (that actually have a rather partial existence that will be discussed in paragraph 12). Assuming the city is a physical representation of culture, these cities produce a cultural discourse free of layers – clear and comprehensible yet one dimensional and simplistic. The discourse is poor in nuance – a rather flat picture of the world as it is reflected in its inhabitants’ cultural (and possibly intellectual) conscience.

6. Cultural layers exist as reminders and symbols of past, yet meaningful, phases of culture. As Roman civilization persists in Latin languages as a layer in Italian and French culture, carrying the ancient Greek and later Jewish layers migrating through religion – such are numerous other influences penetrating culture evident in means of pronounce, belief, cuisine as well as politics and media. Radical modern artists such as Federico Fellini can be better understood when mastering the history of Catholic Church in Italy as well as learning the nuances of Italian dialects and regions, and the trauma of Fascism. New layers are added in a consistent process throughout time and over the generations, seldomly predicting which contemporary culture will persist to become a substantial brick in the tower of civilization.

thoughts and ideas regarding israeli architecture • michael rona

7. Architecture has the privilege, and bardon, of being the only art form actively creating a layer – physical as well as cultural. Architects create the monuments of their times which reflect its values and customs, aesthetics and typologies. Unlike other forms of art – even the least celebrated and anonymous of architects leave their contribution to their time’s layer – simply by planning and building even the humblest house on a side street. It is most likely that Brunelleschi was well-aware of his role in history but are most day to day hard working architects of utilitarian buildings conscious of their role in the layering of culture? Could architects be aware of the combination of values, aesthetics and fashion defined as Zeitgeist – spirit of the times – manifested in their work, which will become a future reminiscent of their generation? Should architecture take place in the discourse about these layers? The modernist movement’s answer to the last question was clear. That was the era of revolution – of a new clean slate, and modernism was not a style but a state-of-mind. By the end of the century tastes and values had changed and former layers had returned to demand their role in architecture practice and theory.

8. Generations are defined by time as well as outstanding events such as wars, plague or great discoveries. Layers of culture are tiers of knowledge and effort composed by numerous people – artists, craftsmen, and poets – at their time and generation. The Renaissance was an era and had its generation of innovative values and revolutionary achievements. Each generation bears its values, habits and slang. Each generation adds its values and beliefs to the layers of time. Some generations value revolution while other react to their predecessors. The twentieth century brought the discourse of generations to the front of a cultural conflict. Great disasters defined the generations who took part in the world wars as well as their successors. Ages of modernism – huge scientific and technologic leaps sparked revolutions as well as romantic perceptions of youth and ‘youngness’ (a term used by Bob Dylan referring to the early 60’s arising movement of what will become counter-culture). The second half of the twentieth century was dominated by the expectation of youngsters to rebel and thus push society to its next political and cultural phase. These paradigms did not exist only 60 years earlier as described in Steffen Zweig’s autobiography The world of Yesterday. We are all born into the present – thrown into a world designed by former generations. We strive to learn its ways and are demanded to obey its rules. As we mature and understand our positions and aspirations as adults, we, in our turn, take place in the never-ending task of adding another layer to culture.

9. Young People enter the adults’ world with the unique opportunity of doubting their predecessors’ assumptions and values. Some of humanity’s greatest leaps were result of youngsters’

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rebellion against existing paradigms. The expectation of youngsters’ rebellion is in itself a cultural value of time – referring, as mentioned before, to the age of revolutions of the past century. Most leading practitioners and teachers of architecture are baby boomers and X-generations – Regarding originality and authenticity with a sense of conflict with existing or imaginary ‘establishments’ (without referring to the actual practice of life and economy…). These expectations, when implemented on students and young architects, might lead to disappointment: The vast majority of Israel’s young generation shows no sign of revolting. On the contrary – We are currently witnessing a Renaissance of the pre-state Jewish communities’ heritage and folklore. The ages of great revolutions – of the ‘New Jew’ in the brave new world, the utopian society of pioneers, has given way to a loving look at almost forgotten customs expressed in culinary, religious sentiment and a strong sense of family.

10. Filling the Void paradoxically, and understandably – the young Israelis’ rebellion is actually an embracement of the missing layers of culture. As Israeli society seeks normality after decades of struggling over the creation of a new people and state – Its youngsters are filling the void created by the modernist and Zionist revolutions. This cultural trend is can be observed in music, literature and art and is part of an attempt to establish a long-lasting identity for a community that shares an ancient heritage but practically lacks a recent mutual past.

11. Architectural Void is most evident in Israeli cities – mostly in those established during the twentieth century, displaying a vast majority of non-descript modernistic cubes bearing no ornament – one-layer environments with no past. The few rather old cities are actually Palestinian towns demolished or heavily damaged in the wars and regarded for many years as enemy heritage rather than an option of enriching the environmental culture. The architectural, unlike the cultural void is practically impossible to fill – having no source to refer to and no past layers to dwell upon. Israeli architects are very easy on the trigger of plan and design – we are creating new volumes on a daily basis, envied by our rather horrified European colleagues who probably regard us as irresponsible. Israeli architects are skilled in a Tabula Rasa way of thought and practice – creating the new with hardly any ‘old’, with which one can build an intellectual structure of architectural theory and sensitivity. This sense of ‘instant’ architecture is mutual to the next-generation architects since we all practice architecture in the same modernist non-historic surrounding. Basically, although we have aspirations and conversations about locality, and although some sensitivity of conservation is being achieved – Israeli architecture exists in a single layer intellectual manner.

thoughts and ideas regarding israeli architecture • michael rona

12. A missing layer which belonged to the native Palestinian inhabitants – whose settlements were partially demolished in war, or heavily neglected – exists physically above and below the surface but is mostly overseen by Israelis. As Israel is an immigrants’ society with a strong ideological sense of reviving an ancient culture – Israelis tend to ignore former rulers of the country’s reminiscent, that are anyway quite scares – since it’s rather provincial location. Adding the political conflict still active and present can explain the deprivation of Arab and Palestinian urban and Architectural tissue but not justify it. Yet at the few locations taking advantage of the Palestinian layer of the city – such as the old quarters of Jaffa – acting as the old city of modernistic Tel-Aviv – one can be impressed by a lively full dimensional urban culture. This at itself rises deep questions of Ethics – having an urban structure being used happily by the culture that deprived its original inhabitants of their hometown.

13. The Next Layer is created, one way or another, by architects. As young Israelis derive on the next layers from the past, Israeli architects should be occupied with the question of the role of the new physical layer role in environmental culture. Should the new urban layers added swiftly to our cities carry values of ‘old’ architecture – ornament and detailing severely missing on modernist facades? Can we even try to fill in the time gaps of the missing layers or should we just look to the future? Would it be dishonest to even try to fill in these voids? Should we regard our lack of former layers as a professional and cultural drawback or an advantage allowing us self-expression denied from our European colleagues practicing in highly sensitive environments caged in their historic layers?

14. Florence and Jerusalem share the mutual character of being extraordinary bright exemplars of past human greatness. Both – especially Florence, touch perfection.

Both cities are extremely vulnerable to physical development and changes, and thus raise the fundamental question of the validity of next layers: Are we allowed to interfere these environments with contemporary additions?

By avoiding addition – are we condemning historical iconic cities to become mummies – bright yet vacant?

Taking the risk of adding new layers – What could be the authentic and relevant statement of our time?

Instructing and reviewing their projects and processes, as well as discussing with Italian colleagues, whose points of view are often opposite, had brought up these questions.

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The annually S.P.A.C.E. seminar brings art and architecture students from both cities to together in joint studios challenging them to deal with the subjects and questions mentioned in this article. The young architects and artists to be are requested to review their personal and social values as well as the Zeitgeist – the spirit of our time – and express their creative conclusions as design proposals for projects in the cities of Jerusalem and Florence.

As Israeli architects are practicing in a historic void, Italians are almost paralyzed by the depth and weight of former layers – leaving them to encounter similar questions – left with no clear answers but with many intriguing challenges.

la storia è l libertà ibertà | history is freedom Fabio Fabbrizzi

Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Architettura DIDA

Nei molti rapporti internazionali che il mio lavoro da qualche anno mi riserva, mi ritrovo inevitabilmente a confrontarmi sulle tante questioni legate al variegato mondo dell’architettura e della sua progettazione. Sono questioni che spaziano all’interno delle diverse componenti del progetto, affrontando aspetti più generali che vanno dagli aspetti ideativi a quelli grafici, dalla dimensione linguistica della forma a quella tecnica, dagli aspetti di natura urbana a quelli paesaggistici, fino a percorrere aspetti più intimamente legati al senso del fare progetto, come ad esempio il rapporto con il luogo e le consonanze con esso, il riconoscerne un carattere, una identità e a loro adeguarsi come possibile momento di inizio del percorso compositivo. In tutte queste sfaccettature, che spesso mettono a confronto dinamiche e sensibilità anche molto diverse tra loro, ovviamente sempre molto utili per non bloccare mai quell’indispensabile processo di crescita progettuale e personale necessario per non fermarsi, un aspetto, però, pare essere il privilegiato sugli altri. Ovvero, un tema sentito da ogni parte come tema centrale, come se fosse davvero il nucleo propulsivo delle nostre

In the international relationships related to my job, I inevitably have to deal with many issues connected to the rich world of architecture and its design. These matters range from the various elements of the project, dealing with more general aspects ranging from the conceptual to the graphic, from the linguistic to the technical dimension of the form, from urban nature to the landscape, up to the aspects that are linked to the meaning of the project, such as the connection and the consonance to the place, the recognition of its peculiarities and identity as a possible starting point for the compositional journey. All these aspects, which often compare different dynamics and sensibilities, are useful to promote the indispensable process of personal and design growth. The aspect that can really be considered the propulsive nucleus of our differences, which sooner or later we inevitably reach, can be traced back to a different feeling towards history, taken as a model for many of our choices and which appears, above all, in the eyes of non-Europeans, the main material with which we build any architectural project.

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differenze e quindi di conseguenza anche dei nostri confronti.

Questo aspetto al quale prima o poi inevitabilmente approdiamo, perché è proprio su questo che fondamentalmente si misura una differenza sostanziale, è riconducibile ad un diverso sentire nei confronti della storia. Una storia che pare essere presa a modello per molte delle nostre scelte e che appare soprattutto agli occhi degli extraeuropei, il materiale principale con il quale costruiamo qualunque progetto d’architettura.

Agli europei ed in particolare agli italiani, questo legame con la storia viene attribuito quasi di default, come se fosse la radice più profonda di quell’eleganza che spesso ci viene confutata, ma nel riconoscerci questa caratteristica, il più delle volte inevitabilmente appariamo agli occhi degli altri come succubi di essa, schiavi di una eredità che per certi aspetti ci limita e ci soffoca. Quindi privilegiati, ma bloccati, figli di un esemplare percorso evolutivo ma oggi completamente incapaci di scriverne una nuova tappa. Per formulare e soprattutto per dare supporto ad una possibile risposta a questa comune percezione, forse bisognerebbe capire un po’ meglio cosa davvero sia la storia.

Se sia un solo susseguirsi di eventi interpretati e raccontati da qualcuno e intesi come un processo unidirezionale che a seconda delle visioni potrebbe essere o provvidenziale o portatore di progresso, se invece sia un fenomeno ciclico o lineare, oppure se sia una via per indicare una possibile e comune dimensione morale, o

To Europeans and in particular to Italians, this link with history is attributed almost by default, as if it were the deepest root of that elegance that has often challenged us. For this reason, most of the time we inevitably appear in the eyes of others as slaves to a legacy that in some ways limits and suffocates us. Therefore privileged, but blocked, children of an exemplary evolutionary path but today completely incapable of writing a new stage. In order to formulate and to support a possible answer to this common perception, perhaps we should understand a little better what history really is. Whether it is a single succession of events interpreted and told by someone and understood as an unidirectional process that could be either providential or bearer of progress, whether it is a cyclical or linear phenomenon, or whether it is a way to indicate a possible and common moral dimension, or even a process capable of leading to the truth.

To begin to probe within these many possibilities, we can start from the philosophical point of view, for which history is and has been many things together. In the light of contemporary thought and in the light of its many different legacies, we can say that all the Western philosophical systems that have tried to give history a possible status, have debated the question of whether or not it is a process that brings progress. All those systems of thought that concerned history as cyclical, or as a regression with respect to a primary condition now unattainable, have adhered to

la storia è libertà • fabio fabbrizzi

finanche, un processo capace di condurre alla verità.

Per iniziare a sondare all’interno di queste molte possibilità, possiamo partire proprio dal punto di vista filosofico, per il quale la storia è ed è stata molte cose insieme. Alla luce del pensiero contemporaneo e alla luce delle sue molte e difformi eredità, possiamo dire che tutti i sistemi filosofici occidentali che hanno tentato di dare un possibile statuto alla storia, si sono dibattuti attorno alla questione se essa sia un processo portatore di progresso, oppure no. A questa seconda possibilità hanno aderito tutti quei sistemi di pensiero che hanno inteso la storia esclusivamente nella sua ciclicità, oppure quelli che l’anno intesa come un regresso rispetto ad una condizione primaria ormai irraggiungibile, ma soprattutto, tutti quei sistemi che l’hanno intesa come una pura e assoluta casualità.

Ma indipendentemente dal portare progresso o meno, la storia ci appare una successione inevitabile perché esclusivamente legata al tempo, quindi ad uno dei parametri fondamentali della nostra esistenza, per questo, percepirsi fuori dalla storia significherebbe misconoscere la dimensione teleologica che inevitabilmente essa porta con sé, ovvero, la comprensione di come tutto sia organizzato in funzione e in vista di un fine. Un fine che nella storia ha mutato forma e direzione e che i diversi sistemi filosofici nel tempo hanno fatto alternativamente dipendere da una volontà divina o provvidenziale, oppure dalla casualità e

this second possibility, but above all, all those systems that have understood it as a pure and absolute accident.

But even if it brings progress or not, history appears to us an inevitable succession because of its link to time, and therefore, to one of the fundamental parameters of our existence. For this reason, to perceive ourselves outside history would mean misunderstanding the teleological dimension according to which everything is organised in function of a purpose. An aim that in history has changed form and direction and that the different philosophical systems over time have alternately made dependent on a divine or providential will, or on chance and even on the immanence of nature, even if all, despite their differences, are equally understood as a possible ordering principle, capable of putting into action the totality of each becoming.

However, it is necessary to arrive to Christianity in order to have a providential and linear conception of time. According to Agostino, in fact, God uses history to carry out his own projects of redemption, it is on earth that the eternal struggle between good and evil is fought where God guides man to the end of time, postponing his judgment until the end of history. With Neoplatonism, philosophical thought looks at the Greek myth and therefore the cyclical vision of history, formalised by the courses and recourses of Vichian memory, returns to the present day, and therefore in analogy with Greek thought according to which

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finanche dall’immanenza della natura, anche se tutti, pur nelle loro ovvie differenze, ugualmente intesi alla stessa stregua di un possibile principio ordinatore, capace di mettere in azione la totalità di ogni divenire.

Mentre nel pensiero greco e nelle dottrine orientali, la storia come cammino dell’uomo torna ripetutamente sui suoi passi in un susseguirsi ciclico di avvenimenti sempre uguali, per avere l’avvio di una concezione lineare occorre arrivare al pensiero romano, di Seneca in particolare, secondo il quale la fiducia in un progresso storico viene espressa dalla consapevolezza che il sapere posseduto dalla sua epoca è più grande di quello passato e che a sua volta sarà minore di quello che possederanno le generazioni future. Bisogna giungere però al cristianesimo per avere una concezione progressiva e lineare del tempo. Secondo Agostino, infatti, Dio usa la storia per realizzare i propri progetti di redenzione, ovvero, è sulla terra che si combatte l’eterna lotta tra il bene e il male dove Dio guida l’uomo solo fino alla fine del tempo, ovvero, rimandando alla fine della storia il suo giudizio.

Con il neoplatonismo rinascimentale, il pensiero filosofico guarda al mito greco e dunque torna alla ribalta la visione ciclica della storia, formalizzata dai corsi e ricorsi di vichiana memoria, nei quali, appunto in analogia con il pensiero greco grazie al quale le idee sono preesistenti ad ogni azione e manifestazione vitale, la storia, altro non è che l’esplicarsi di una verità assoluta.

ideas are pre-existing to every action and vital manifestation, history is nothing other than the expression of an absolute truth.

A concept that also reappears in Romanticism: according to Friedrich Schelling, history is a parameter linked to the freedom of man, not yet completely freed from a superior plan, who lives history as a drama of which only God is the author, while he is the actor who continuously remodels it. But human action tends to approach the absolute despite the limit of never being able to reach it fully, so history, like faith, still remains a visible demonstration of transcendence.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel overturned this vision, stating that the Absolute guided history by the doctrine of the Cunning of Reason, so that there are no timeless preconditions for perceiving history, because human knowledge changes in time and makes all eternal truth fall. So history becomes the only fixed point to which to refer and since truth is no longer understood by him as a transcendent dimension but as the fruit of a dialectical and rational process, there is nothing else but History to perceive the rationality at the basis of everything.

Historicism was born from the concept of the historical and progressive nature of every manifestation of truth, it, together with Positivism will characterize the entire nineteenth century: history will be understood as a linear development of constant human growth, in which the relationship with science occupies

la storia è libertà • fabio fabbrizzi

Concezione che riappare anche nel romanticismo nel quale la storia è intesa da Friedrich Schelling come un parametro legato alla libertà dell’uomo; un uomo ancora non completamente liberato da un disegno superiore che vive la storia come un dramma del quale solo Dio ne è l’autore, mentre egli è l’attore che continuamente la rimodella. Ma l’agire umano nel suo dispiegarsi tende ad avvicinarsi all’assoluto anche se con il limite di non poterlo raggiungere mai compiutamente, per cui la storia come la fede, rimangono ancora una dimostrazione visibile di trascendenza.

Ci vorrà il pensiero di Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel il quale decise che fosse l’assoluto a guidare la storia servendosi dell’astuzia della ragione, a capovolgere questa visione, per il quale non esistono presupposti atemporali per percepire la storia, perché la conoscenza umana muta nel tempo e fa cadere ogni verità eterna. Quindi è la storia che diviene l’unico punto fisso al quale riferirsi e poiché la verità non viene da lui più intesa come dimensione trascendente ma come frutto di un processo dialettico e razionale, non esiste altro che la storia per percepire la razionalità alla base di ogni cosa.

Sulla scia di questa sottolineatura della natura storica e progressiva di ogni manifestazione della verità, nasce lo storicismo che insieme al positivismo caratterizzerà l’intero Ottocento, formulando una concezione della storia intesa come sviluppo lineare di costante accrescimento umano, nel quale il rapporto con una

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a central place. With the crisis of scientific thought we return to a new declination of the eschatological vision of history, we try again to understand the ultimate goal of existence by questioning ourselves, as Martin Heidegger did, about existing. In fact, he elaborates a conception of history as a temporal horizon in which being unveils itself. An action that can only take place thanks to language, above all poetic language, and only thanks to time that casts a dimension of movement and transformation on being. Being reveals itself through language, so history, which is the privileged expression of being, is inevitably language itself.

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scienza intesa come aspetto sempre più importante, occupa un posto centrale.

Con la crisi della tecnica si ritorna ad una nuova declinazione della visione escatologica della storia, ovvero, si cerca nuovamente di comprendere il fine ultimo dell’esistenza interrogandosi, come ha fatto il pensiero di Martin Heidegger, attorno all’essere. Per questo, egli elabora una visione della storia intesa come orizzonte temporale nel quale l’essere, appunto, si disvela. Un’azione che può avvenire solo grazie al linguaggio, soprattutto poetico, e solo grazie al tempo che getta sull’essere una dimensione di movimento e di trasformazione. Dunque l’essere si rivela con il linguaggio, quindi la storia che è l’espressione privilegiata dell’essere è inevitabilmente a sua volta linguaggio. Detto questo, il dibattito con le riflessioni sul senso della storia continua per l’intero Novecento perdurando fino ai nostri giorni ad ulteriore testimonianza del suo indispensabile valore, anche se con tesi diametralmente opposte a quelle teleologiche ed escatologiche. Basti pensare ad un Karl Popper che afferma che non esiste nessun senso nascosto nella storia e che essa non sia altro che una concatenazione casuale di eventi. Visione questa, approfondita in tempi più recenti dal pensiero strutturalista e post-strutturalista, per i quali, grazie all’imperante nichilismo in essi contenuto, la storia non solo è il ciclico ripetersi del caso, ma una categoria che viene a poco a poco decostruita in favore della fascinazione dell’esperienza di un eterno presente.

The debate on the meaning of history continues throughout the twentieth century and continues to this day as a further testimony to its indispensable value, even if with diametrically opposed point of view to the teleological ones. Just think of Karl Popper for whom there is no hidden meaning in history, it is nothing more than a random concatenation of events.

This view has been deepened in more recent times by Structuralist and post-structuralist thought, for whom, history is not only the cyclical repetition of chance, but a category that is gradually being deconstructed in favour of the fascination of the experience of an eternal present.

As an architect, as a design teacher, but above all as a man, I can only adhere to a vision of history as a succession of events, cases and vicissitudes ordered according to a line of development that is not necessarily chronological, but also an expression of language, the highest expression of being. Every man exists only in the temporal process of his history, but the history of my time is made up of all past stories, because as humans we participate in the memory of humanity.

How, then, can we reset to zero all this complexity formed over time around the idea of history? an idea that has given structure to our way of conceiving and perceiving the world?

How can we overcome all the overlaps that the thought on history and history brings with it? and how can we dissolve the threads of its infinite intersections by eliminating a becoming

la storia è libertà • fabio fabbrizzi

Da architetto, da insegnante di progettazione, ma soprattutto da uomo, non posso che aderire ad una visione della storia come successione di eventi, di casi e di vicende infilati da una ricostruzione ordinata secondo una linea di sviluppo non necessariamente cronologica, ma anche soprattutto come espressione di linguaggio, così come non posso non aderire ad intendere il linguaggio come la più alta espressione dell’essere. Ovvio, che essendo nel tempo, vivo la storia del mio tempo, perché ogni uomo esiste solo nel processo temporale della sua storia, ma la storia del mio tempo è formata da tutte le storie passate, perché in quanto umani partecipiamo alla memoria dell’umanità.

Come azzerare, allora, tutta questa complessità formata nel tempo attorno all’idea di storia; un’idea che ha dato struttura al nostro modo di concepire e percepire il mondo? Come superare con un colpo di spugna tutte le sovrapposizioni che il pensiero sulla storia e della storia porta con sé e come sciogliere i fili delle sue infinite intersezioni azzerando un divenire che corrisponde alla nostra stessa esistenza?

Ecco, allora, che se il linguaggio è l’espressione privilegiata dell’essere e a sua volta l’essere si rivela con il linguaggio e poiché l’architettura, come Victor Hugo fa dire a Frollo -protagonista del suo Notre Dame de Paris- è il grande testo dell’umanità, l’architettura non può essere altro che il linguaggio più visibile e più potente della storia; quello che ne narra le vicende nella maniera più autentica e profonda. Quindi non solo ci è impossibile smorzare questa sua

that corresponds to our very existence? If language is the privileged expression of being and in turn being reveals itself through language and since architecture, as Victor Hugo’s Frollo - the protagonist of Notre Dame de Paris - says, is the great text of humanity, it represents the most visible and powerful language in history, the one that narrates its events in the most authentic and deep way. So not only it’s impossible for us to reduce its power, but we cannot even imagine an architecture that is detached from history, that is, detached from the becoming that forms the basis of every process of existence, precisely because most European and Italian design thinking in particular has inevitably always been linked to this condition. And even when it might seem that the formal expressions of a given period denied those of the previous period, in the field of architecture, Italian design has always allowed the new to have its roots in the past.

This is not because history suffocates and overwhelms us, but simply because it accompanies us and orients us like a benevolent guide that does not impose but suggests, indicating a possible way to evolve the past into the present and in turn to evolve the present into the future: through time - another vehicle of expression of being - a continuity rather than a break will be established.

History is not only the unconscious heritage of everyone, but the sense that it possesses and unveils, which is inseparable from our design identity, that is, that sensitivity, given to us as

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potenza, ma neanche nemmeno immaginare la possibilità di un’architettura come fatto avulso dalla storia, ovvero slegata da quel divenire che costituisce la base di ogni processo di esistenza, proprio perché la maggior parte del pensiero progettuale europeo e italiano in particolare, è inevitabilmente sempre stato legato a questa condizione. E questo è avvenuto anche quando poteva sembrare che le espressioni formali di un determinato periodo negassero quelle del periodo precedente, proprio perché in campo architettonico, la progettualità italiana ha sempre permesso al nuovo di affondare le sue radici nell’antico.

Questo non perché la storia ci soffochi e ci sovrasti, ma semplicemente perché la storia ci accompagna e ci orienta come una guida benevola che non impone ma suggerisce, indicandoci una possibile strada per evolvere il passato nel presente e a sua volta per evolvere il presente nel futuro, in modo che attraverso il tempo -altro veicolo d’espressione dell’esserepossa instaurarsi una continuità piuttosto che una rottura.

Non è tanto la storia, dunque, che è patrimonio inconsapevole di tutti, ma il senso che essa possiede e che disvela, ad appartenerci come un dato indissolubile all’interno della nostra identità progettuale, ovvero, un senso della storia capace di costruire una sensibilità, dataci come carattere genetico che riesce a muovere le leve della parte più consapevole della ricerca progettuale italiana, facendola sembrare però alla maggior parte del resto del mondo

a genetic character, that manages to move the levers of the most conscious part of Italian design research, making it seem, however, to most of the rest of the world as non-essential, or even worse, as a bizarre style.

It is clear, however, that our contemporary condition is no longer characterised by the presence of a great narrative; modernity, perhaps, was the last era to gather within itself a solid unified vision, a possible sense of the future. Having weakened the foundations of modernity and freed our thinking towards new horizons, modernity has not succeeded in producing anything that equates it in terms of cohesion and convergence: we therefore live in the awareness of a shattered condition in search of a lost unity.

It is therefore necessary to reassign a new code of interpretation to the meaning of history, otherwise the architectural project would be just a sterile overview of neo and post, a compulsion to repeat what has already been experienced.

Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it, says George Santayana in his critical realism: contemporary architectural design should express not only the interaction between the form of content and the form of expressions but also be capable of ‘making things right’, offering the possibility of understanding the proactive dimension that history and memory carry within themselves, making them appear in their dynamism of flow, rather than in the rhetorical immobility of a compartmentalized vision.

la storia è libertà • fabio fabbrizzi

come un dato non indispensabile, o ancor peggio come un bizzarro vezzo di stile.

Appare evidente però, come la nostra condizione contemporanea non sia più caratterizzata dalla presenza di una grande narrazione; l’ultima delle quali in ordine di tempo è stata forse la modernità, che riusciva a raccogliere dentro una solida visione unitaria, un possibile senso di futuro. Depotenziato il margine di quel pensiero, scardinate le sue fondamenta e liberato il suo ambito verso nuovi orizzonti, la contemporaneità non è riuscita a produrre nulla che la equivalga in termini di coesione e di convergenza e viviamo una condizione fatta di frammenti che nella cognizione della propria condizione infranta, anela alla ricerca di un’unità perduta.

Va da sé, quindi, che occorre riassegnare un nuovo codice di interpretazione al senso della storia, perché se così non facessimo, il progetto di architettura sarebbe solo una sterile carrellata di neo e di post, ovvero, una coazione a ripetere il già sperimentato.

Chi non conosce la storia è condannato a ripeterla, amava ripetere George Santayana proprio come base del suo realismo critico, per cui in maniera più estesa, sarebbe davvero necessario comprendere che il senso odierno che la storia e la memoria possono avere nei confronti del progetto contemporaneo dell’architettura, dovrebbe essere un senso che oltre ad essere inteso come l’interazione tra la forma dei contenuti e la forma delle espressioni, sia anche capace di ‘rendere ragione’ alle

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The history that serves as the basis for the project must be built on the slow sedimentation that transpires from the characteristics of each era, perceived through its different permanences, that is, through all those figures that, regardless of the expressive languages with which they show themselves, do not change in their substance and represent the differences between the various territories, structure the nature of the contexts and mark the essence of the places. A history, therefore, that is not only linked to human heritage but also to the environmental, natural, paradigm of reference to which the new should adapt.

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cose, ovvero, offra la possibilità di comprendere la dimensione propositiva che la storia e la memoria portano in sé, facendocele apparire nel loro dinamismo di flusso, piuttosto e non nell’immobilismo retorico di una visione a compartimenti stagni.

La storia che serve come base al progetto è dunque una storia che potremo dire essere sottesa, cioè non necessariamente legata solo ai suo macro momenti, ma costruita sulla lenta sedimentazione che a ben vedere traspare dalle caratteristiche di ogni epoca, percepita attraverso le sue diverse permanenze, ovvero attraverso tutte quelle figure che indipendentemente dai linguaggi espressivi con le quali si mostrano, non mutano nella loro sostanza e per quanto riguarda il mondo dell’architettura formano le differenze tra i vari territori, strutturano la natura dei contesti e segnano l’essenza dei luoghi. Una storia, dunque, che non è solo legata al patrimonio umano ma anche a quello ambientale, naturale, in modo da costituire un paradigma di riferimento al quale il nuovo dovrebbe assonarsi.

Ma l’assonanza tra la forma della nuova architettura e la storia del proprio contesto intesa come patrimonio identitario, non è certo una regola imposta e assoluta e ovviamente non c’è nessuna legge che la prescriva. Essa, per quanto mi riguarda, è semplicemente una deduzione del buon senso, alla stessa stregua del sentire come l’armonia si trovi più nella continuità di un sottile gioco di rimandi tra il presente e il passato che non nello strappo della tradizione e

But the assonance between the form of the new architecture and the history of its own context as a heritage of identity is certainly not an imposed, absolute rule. As far as I am concerned, it is simply a deduction of common sense, the harmony of the continuity of a subtle play of references between the present and the past, not the tearing up of tradition in the conviction that in our contemporary condition the only meaning of beauty that can be admitted is that understood as truth. A truth that has never been shouted and never disheartened, simply crossed through the refined game of allusion and cross-reference. Reminiscent and never showing, alluding and never offering, evoking and never representing, as well as recalling and never describing, all those characters that in an evident or ineffable, clear or underlying way, manage to form the uniqueness of a city, of a landscape, of a territory, of an environment, in short, of any place in which one has to operate.

In assigning a desirable new code of interpretation to the sense of history, it is clear that the design journey itself is an interpretative process, so the whole, act and context, project and place, are part of the same hermeneutical circle thanks to which, the part refers to the whole and the whole to the part. Every time an architect finds himself working in a place, it is normal that his understanding is conditioned by a sort of pre-comprehension given by the historical, cultural and environmental environment in which he lives. Knowledge is

la storia è libertà • fabio fabbrizzi

alla stessa stregua del capire come nella nostra condizione contemporanea l’unica accezione di bellezza che si possa ammettere è quella intesa come verità. Una verità che non dovrebbe mai essere urlata e mai sguaiata, ma semplicemente percorsa attraverso il gioco raffinato dell’allusione e del rimando. Rammemorando e mai mostrando, alludendo e mai offrendo, evocando e mai rappresentando, così come richiamando e mai descrivendo, tutti quei caratteri che in maniera evidente o ineffabile, chiara o sottesa, riescono a formare l’unicità di una città, di un paesaggio, di un territorio, di un ambiente, insomma, di un qualsiasi luogo nel quale ci si trovi a dovere operare.

Nell’assegnare, come detto, un auspicabile nuovo codice di interpretazione al senso della storia, non possiamo non comprendere però, che lo stesso processo progettuale è già di per sé un processo interpretativo, quindi il tutto, atto e contesto, progetto e luogo, partecipano di un medesimo circolo ermeneutico nel quale e grazie al quale, la parte rimanda al tutto e il tutto alla parte. Per cui, tutte le volte che un architetto si trova ad operare in un luogo, è normale che la sua comprensione sia condizionata da una sorta di pre-comprensione data dall’ambiente storico, culturale e ambientale in cui vive. Ne deriva che la conoscenza allora, altro non è che un continuo flusso di interscambio tra nozioni già apprese e quelle da apprendere, cioè tra apprendimento e interpretazione, situandola in un orizzonte di senso -storico e personale- originato proprio dalla

nothing more than a continuous flow of interchange between notions already learned and to be learned, between learning and interpretation, situated within a horizon of meaning historical and personal - originating precisely from the circular stratification of what is consolidated and what has just been acquired.

For this reason, a large part of contemporary design research conducted in Italy has long been moving in the direction of reassigning a new value to history. In the aftermath of the Second World War in our country it was realised that the absolute and self-referential assertiveness of the Modern could not dialogue with the specificity of our places, so design thought has critically revised the idea of a new at all costs, developing the feeling of an innovation understood as a small but fundamental mutation in the order of a tradition, always perceived in a transformative dimension linked to becoming and not as immobility. A memory, a history, capable therefore of structuring over time the image of Italian cities like Florence, Milan, Rome, Venice, Bologna - though I could well include Jerusalem - in which identity and character appear more clearly than in others, a fact that has not prevented them from changing over time, always remaining faithful to themselves. A tradition capable of consolidating itself in the landscapes and their architecture, expressing in different but strongly recognizable declinations the prevailing characters of the different geographical areas.

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stratificazione circolare di ciò che è consolidato e di ciò che è stato appena acquisito.

Per questo, ovvero per la cospicua presenza del già consolidato, una buona parte della ricerca contemporanea progettuale condotta in Italia, si muove da tempo nella direzione della riassegnazione di un nuovo valore da attribuire alla storia. Da tempo remoto ormai, quando all’indomani del secondo dopoguerra nel nostro Paese ci si accorse che le assertività assolute e autoreferenziali del Moderno non potevano dialogare con le specificità dei nostri luoghi, il pensiero progettuale ha revisionato criticamente l’idea di un nuovo a tutti costi, sviluppando il sentimento di un’innovazione intesa come una piccola ma fondamentale mutazione nell’ordine di una tradizione. Una tradizione percepita da sempre nella propria dimensione trasformativa legata al divenire e non una tradizione intesa come immobilità.

Una tradizione, una memoria, una storia, capaci quindi, di strutturare nel tempo l’immagine di città italiane come Firenze, Milano, Roma, Venezia, Bologna –anche se potrei benissimo includervi anche Gerusalemme- nelle quali l’identità e il carattere appare più manifestatamente che in altre, ma che non ha impedito loro di mutare nel tempo, ovvero di mutare comunque, rimanendo sempre fedeli a sé stesse. Ma anche una tradizione che è stata capace di consolidarsi nei paesaggi e nelle loro architetture, esprimendone in declinazioni diverse ma fortemente riconoscibili, i differenti caratteri prevalenti delle diverse aree geografiche.

It is difficult, therefore, not to take on all this consolidated heritage in our work; it is difficult to think that the evolution of the project consists only in abandoning everything that has been in favour of the fascination of a new one at all costs, because history, memory and tradition, which someone can perceive as a brake, represent the true genetic structure of our cultural heritage. It is difficult to separate what we see from what we know and what we do from what we are. A history that belongs to us as a deep substratum and that at the same time makes us belong to it in an indissoluble and biunivocal way, because we, without any rhetoric, are this history and even when we open a window of our house, it pours over us in a continuity that is made of measurements, materials, geometries, just as when we move in a street of any Italian city, it reveals itself in the consistency of its streets and squares, in the geometry and proportion of its buildings, as well as in the density of its fabrics. When it is not the city, it is the landscape that highlights the constant relationship with the historical dimension, because it too is the result of centuries of human modification, we can say that it represents the transcription in the environment of our own history, or rather, a permanent narrative of it visible in the signs and figures of the territory. By this I am not saying, of course, that the Italian territory has not been adversely affected by the abandonment of its historical sense and that it has not been insulted by the breaking of its continuity. It has been

la storia è libertà • fabio fabbrizzi

È difficile, quindi, non assumere tutto questo consolidatissimo patrimonio nel nostro lavoro; difficile pensare che l’evoluzione del progetto consista solo nell’abbandono di tutto quello che è stato in favore della fascinazione di un nuovo a tutti costi, perché tutta questa storia, tutta questa memoria, tutta questa tradizione che qualcuno può percepire come un freno, ci appartengono come la vera struttura genetica del nostro patrimonio culturale e ci è difficile separare quello che vediamo da quello che sappiamo e quello che facciamo da quello che siamo. Una storia che ci appartiene come substrato profondo e che al contempo ci fa appartenere a lei in maniera indissolubile e biunivoca, perché noi, senza retorica alcuna, siamo questa storia e anche solo quando apriamo una finestra di casa, essa si riversa su di noi in una continuità che è fatta di misure, di materie, di geometrie, così come quando ci muoviamo in una strada di una qualunque città italiana, essa si svela nella consistenza delle sue strade e delle sue piazze, nella geometria e nella proporzione dei suoi edifici, così come nella densità dei suoi tessuti. Quando non è la città è il paesaggio a mettere in evidenza il costante rapporto con la dimensione storica, perché anch’esso è il frutto della modificazione secolare attuata dall’uomo, tanto che potremo dire che rappresenta la trascrizione nell’ambiente della stessa nostra storia, ovvero, una sua narrazione permanente visibile nei segni e nelle figure del territorio.

and still is, unfortunately, but I like to glimpse, even in this homologating devastation, the spark of possible resistance. If it was precisely an erroneous sense of history that shattered the last ‘great narrative’ of history itself, it could be a renewed sense of history that is the point from which to start again to try to fight the aphasia and uncertainty of our time.

At the same time, it is not only those who are repositories of history who are able to design; on the contrary, we are always increased by comparison and exchange with other international realities, above all because we come into contact with an active possibility of building architecture, which is impossible even to

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Con questo non dico, ovviamente, che il territorio italiano non sia stato straziato dall’abbandono del suo senso storico e che non sia stato ingiuriato dalla rottura della sua continuità. Lo è stato e lo è tutt’ora, purtroppo, ma mi piace intravedere, pur in questa omologante devastazione, la scintilla di una possibile resistenza. Così, come ho detto che è’ stato proprio un errato senso della storia a infrangere l’ultima ‘grande narrazione’ della storia stessa, anche in questo caso mi piace pensare che potrebbe essere un rinnovato senso della storia il punto da cui ripartire per cercare di combattere l’afasia e l’incertezza del nostro tempo.

Allo stesso tempo non dico che solo chi è portatore di storia sia in grado di fare progetto; anzi, dal confronto e dallo scambio con altre realtà internazionali se ne esce sempre accresciuti, per le relazioni e le conoscenze fatte ma soprattutto perché si entra in contatto con una fattiva possibilità di costruire l’architettura, impossibile anche solo da pensare nello stagnante immobilismo italiano. Un immobilismo che in molti casi nasce proprio anch’esso da un’errata lettura della storia, vista solo come pretesto classificatorio di elementi stilistici e non come materiale ‘attivo’ da cui attingere.

Noi, dunque, viviamo nella storia e siamo la storia e ogni architettura e ogni paesaggio ne sono l’espressione più autentica e compiuta, ovvero, sono il risultato di una stratificazione orientata di forme e relazioni che sono state pensate come soluzione migliore nel tempo e in un luogo, come risposta ad una precisa

think about in Italy’s stagnant immobility. An immobility that in many cases arises precisely from a misreading of history, seen only as a pretext for classifying stylistic elements and not as ’active’ material from which to draw.

We, therefore, live in history and we are history and every architecture and every landscape are the most authentic and complete expression of it, that is, they are the result of an oriented stratification of forms and relationships conceived as the best solution in time and place, as an answer to a precise question. A history, therefore, that contains its own dynamic, evolutionary, proactive dimension and that we contemporary designers will have to collect in the compositional process as indispensable data to aspire to that physical and paradigmatic continuity with the place, worthy of any self-respecting architecture. Analysis is the first phase of the project, even when trying to reassign a new value to history. It consists of the collection of starting data and is impregnated with pre-conditions inherent in the culture and experience of those who put it into practice. Only what is known can be seen and this directs the designer’s sensitivity to grasp certain aspects that should be instrumental to the project, aspects that are also completely marginal, but capable of building a world of reference, and all aimed at the search for recurring themes, types and figures that together form not the typicality, but the identity of the place.

If the architect has the sensitivity and humility to keep quiet inside and around himself,

la storia è libertà • fabio fabbrizzi

questione. Una storia, quindi, che contiene una propria dimensione dinamica, evolutrice, propositiva e che noi progettisti contemporanei, dovremo raccogliere nel processo compositivo come dato indispensabile per aspirare a quella continuità fisica e paradigmatica con il luogo, degna di una qualunque architettura che si rispetti. Quindi l’analisi è comunque la prima fase del progetto, anche quando si cerca di riassegnare alla storia un nuovo valore. Essa consiste nella raccolta dei dati di partenza e come ho già detto, è impregnata di pre-condizioni insite nella cultura e nel vissuto di chi la mette in pratica. Si vede solo ciò che si conosce, recita un noto adagio e questo orienta la sensibilità del progettista a cogliere determinati aspetti rispetto ad altri. Aspetti che dovrebbero essere strumentali al progetto, ma anche aspetti del tutto marginali, anche se capaci di costruire un mondo di riferimento, ma tutti comunque ugualmente volti alla ricerca di temi, tipi e figure ricorrenti che insieme formano non la tipicità, bensì l’identità del luogo, che è cosa profondamente diversa.

Molte volte ho già avuto modo di dire e di scrivere che se l’architetto ha la sensibilità, ma anche l’umiltà di fare silenzio dentro e attorno a sé e mettersi in ‘ascolto’ del luogo, ecco che allora il luogo potrà inaspettatamente suggerire la via da percorrere. Come se il progetto fosse ‘già scritto’ nelle sue caratteristiche, nella sua natura, nella sua contingenza, nelle specificità e nelle anomalie ma anche nel suo immaginario, nella sua figuratività e nella sua idea e

then the place can unexpectedly suggest the way forward, as if the project were “already written” in its characteristics, in its nature, in its contingency, in its specificity and anomalies, in its figurativeness and in its idea, so that, through the practice of composing, it can be found and brought to life again because it is already visible to those who are willing to listen.

How can we put these materials at the service of architecture and its design and, above all, how can we make them become living matter and not just a reference background so that the new is not just a banal re-proposal?

The designer knows that any analysis should highlight elements that are indispensable to the triggering and growth of the new design act. The elements, shapes, styles, languages, as

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che attraverso la pratica del comporre si possa ritrovarlo e farlo emergere a nuova vita perché già visibile a chi è disposto a far parlare il luogo, prima della propria biografia.

Cosa fare però di questi materiali dedotti e disvelati dall’analisi effettuata al luogo, come metterli a servizio dell’architettura e del suo progetto e soprattutto come farli diventare materia viva e non solo sottofondo di riferimento affinché il nuovo non sia solo una banale riproposizione?

Ogni progettista sa che ogni analisi dovrebbe essere tendenziosa, cioè dovrebbe orientarsi alla messa in evidenza di elementi che saranno indispensabili all’innesco e alla crescita del nuovo atto progettuale. Ma bisogna porre molta attenzione perché gli elementi, le forme, gli stilemi, i linguaggi, così come le materie, i colori, le misure, le matrici, le permanenze e le ricorrenze, non sono lì per essere semplicemente ripresi e riversati acriticamente nelle nuove forme dell’architettura, bensì per essere criticamente e sensibilmente interpretati.

Se così non fosse, il nuovo progetto sarebbe la semplice parodia del vecchio e i nuovi elementi solo forme sterilizzate ed istantanee di un’architettura senza vita, prive cioè, di quel divenire necessario affinché un’architettura possa dirsi allo stesso tempo contemporanea ma anche completamente inserita nel flusso vitale della storia.

Da molti anni, infatti, nella mia visione del progetto e nelle forme del mio insegnamento, la parola interpretazione è andata a sostituire

well as materials, colours, sizes, matrices, continuum and recurrences are not there to be simply taken up and uncritically poured into the new forms of architecture, but rather to be sensibly interpreted. If this were not the case, the new project would be a simple parody of the old and the new elements only sterile, instantaneous forms of a lifeless architecture, that is, devoid of that becoming necessary for an architecture to be at the same time contemporary but also completely inserted in the vital flow of history.

For many years, in fact, in my design vision, the word Interpretation has replaced the word Intuition, because it is precisely through an interpretative process that the architect can succeed in transforming the fruit of analysis into an action capable of synthesising all the components of the place and its history, including architecture, and presenting them in a changed form. To change does not mean, however, to uproot, but to transform and modify in such a way that what has been produced is still perfectly comprehensible within the same context, rewriting the same text with new words. The project must not alter the sense of place, but takes root in it, must be its expression, dialogue and relate to its distinct components. The encounter, Roland Barthes quotes “the opening of other possibilities, opportunities for new meanings. opportunities for dialogue and exploration”: the architectural project is one of the examples in which ‘the encounter’ should best express itself.

la storia è libertà • fabio fabbrizzi

la parola intuizione, perché è proprio attraverso un processo interpretativo che l’architetto può riuscire a trasformare il frutto dell’analisi in un’azione fattiva. Un’azione grazie alla quale sia possibile prendere tutte le componenti del luogo e della sua storia, ovviamente anche architettonica, e riproporle in forma mutata, ricordando come mutare non significhi stravolgere e sradicare, ma trasformare e modificare in maniera tale affinché quello che si è prodotto risulti ancora perfettamente comprensibile all’interno dello stesso contesto; in altre parole, come se si riscrivesse lo stesso testo con parole nuove. Questo perché il nuovo progetto non dovrebbe alterare il senso del luogo, ma radicarsi ad esso, esserne l’espressione, dialogare e relazionarsi con le sue distinte componenti. Le cose non sono altro che l’incontro tra delle loro relazioni, chiosava Roland Barthes e il progetto d’architettura è uno degli esempi nei quali questo incontro dovrebbe percepirsi al meglio.

Scrivere con parole nuove lo stesso testo ma nello scrivere modificarlo impercettibilmente per rendere ancora riconoscibile il proprio senso, significa agire nella profondità che caratterizza le relazioni tra le parti. Significa andare dritti all’essenza delle cose, riuscendo a dedurre da ogni forma, da ogni esperienza da ogni congettura che la storia ci porti, i principi in essa custoditi. Quindi nel progetto, significa lavorare sui principi di forme e non sulle forme, perché le forme sono l’espressione del tempo, quindi l’immagine visibile e mutevole della storia, mentre i principi in esse

Writing the same text with new words, modifying it imperceptibly to make its meaning recognizable, means acting in the depth that characterizes the relationships between the parties. It means going straight to the essence of things, being able to deduce from every form, from every experience, from every conjecture that history brings us, the principles that are kept in it. In the project it is necessary to work on the principles of forms and not on forms, because they are the expression of time, therefore the visible and changeable image of history, while the principles underlying them constitute the invariant and the essence on which to focus our attention. The different constitutive principles of space, as well as the theme of mass together with that of fluidity, as well as the synthesis between the parts and the hierarchy of space, are just some of the principles that remain unchanged in the various phases of history, while the languages and expressions in which these principles evolve over time, vary. To work of interpretation only on the principles of history, means then, escaping from the danger of the slippery road of the citation, avoiding any possible misunderstanding on the meaning of history.

Working with history in architectural design does not mean reproposing the formal materials of the past sterilely, but from the past, taking the principles underlying those same materials and evolving them into new configurations without betraying their meaning.With the representation phase the design process seems to

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sottesi costituiscono l’invariante e l’essenza su cui porre la nostra attenzione. I diversi principi costitutivi dello spazio, così come il tema della massa e della murarietà insieme a quello della fluidità, così come la sintassi tra le parti e la gerarchizzazione dello spazio, sono solo alcuni tra i principi a rimanere inalterati nelle varie fasi della storia, mentre a variare sono i linguaggi e le espressioni nei quali questi principi si declinano nel tempo.

Lavorare di interpretazione sui soli principi della storia, significa allora, scampare dal pericolo della scivolosa percorrenza della strada della citazione, evitando ogni possibile fraintendimento sul senso della storia. Lavorare con la storia nel progetto di architettura, non significa riproporre sterilmente i materiali formali del passato, ma dal passato, prendere i principi sottesi in quegli stessi materiali ed evolverli in nuove configurazioni senza tradirne il senso.

Va da sé che con la fase della rappresentazione il processo progettuale pare esaurirsi perché diviene ‘il progetto’ e non più ‘un progetto’, ma non esiste un punto definitivo alla fine di questo percorso, nel senso che la critica operativa che vi si pratica durante la fase interpretativa, può continuare ben oltre la fase della rappresentazione, con la quale, si ferma soltanto quella configurazione che ci sembra rispondere al meglio ai presupposti iniziali tra tutte le infinite variazioni sul tema. Il lavorare all’interno di un processo interpre-tativo del luogo e della sua inevitabile storia, costituisce quindi a mio parere, l’approccio più sensibile

be exhausted because it becomes ‘the project’ and no longer ‘a project’, but there is no definitive point at the end of this path, in the sense that the operational criticism that is practiced during the interpretation phase can continue well beyond the representation phase, with which only that configuration that seems to us to best meet the initial assumptions among all the infinite variations on the theme stops.

Working within an interpretative process of the place and its inevitable history is therefore the most sensitive and above all the freest and most personal approach that the world of design can take. A freedom that is not based on any method and that does not even identify any systematization of practices, but rather, a phenomenological sensitivity that is not a recipe to be applied mechanically to every situation, but only a research that starts all over again. Every student architect therefore has the chance to put his or her own sensitivity into play and to interpret the history of each place with his or her own personal baggage of experiences and stories. A story unveiled in different, personal ways by analysis, which proposes categories and principles interpreted in a design process that is not intended to be a break, but a real exercise in memory and becoming, always with a view to the foreshadowing of a new architecture that can hopefully act as a fragment of the place for which it is designed. So design by interpreting the latent memory in every place, making the place ‘speak’ in the designer’s place, taking care to

la storia è libertà • fabio fabbrizzi

e soprattutto più libero e persona-le che il mondo del progetto possa percorrere. Una libertà che non si basa su nessun metodo e che non individua nemmeno nessuna siste-matizzazione di prassi, bensì, una fenomenolo-gica sensibilità che non costituisce una ricetta da applicare meccanicamente ad ogni situazio-ne, ma solo una ricerca che riparte ogni vol-ta da capo. Ad ogni architetto, ma anche nelle nostre esperienze didattiche internazionali e non, ad ogni allievo architetto, spetta dunque, la possibilità di mettere in campo la propria sensibilità di interpretare con il proprio perso-nale bagaglio di esperienze e di storie, la storia di ogni luogo. Una storia disvelata in modi di-versi e personali dall’analisi, in modo da met-terne in evidenza caratteri, categorie e principi da riproporre interpretati in un processo di pro-getto che non vuole porsi come rottura a tutti i costi. Un progetto che senza rinunciare agli indispensabili aspetti della ricerca e dell’inno-vazione, può essere inteso come un vero e pro-prio esercizio, al contempo di memoria e di divenire, sempre in vista della prefigurazione di una nuova architettura che possa porsi au-spicabilmente come frammento assonante nei confronti del luogo per il quale viene pensata.

Quindi, progettare interpretando la memoria latente in ogni luogo, altro non significa che fare ‘parlare’ il luogo al posto della personalità del progettista, avendo cura di far sparire il più possibile l’invadenza della sua mano in favore di un delicato intrecciarsi di sensi, che tra vec-

make the intrusiveness of his hand disappear as much as possible in favour of a delicate interweaving of old and new senses that will form the complexity of the new architecture.

Place, history, memory, interpretation, character, identity, composition and design are, therefore, the key words of a process that on an operational and mental level moves within a fluid, constant dimension that should not admit intermittence and that should let every architect and every student of architecture glimpse all the beauty contained within it. We design for this beauty-truth, not only to change the status quo of the world, but for those few moments in which it is clear to us that man is the object and subject of all our reasoning and to make a contribution, sometimes minimal and sometimes indispensable, to a common process of transformation, since we architects are the silent creators of this small but indispensable spark of becoming.

Becoming is the final objective of a process that leads to the perennial flow of things; becoming, as well as designing, means holding together all the possible frames of the past, with all those of the present and all those of the future, it means living in the legacy left to us by yesterday, in the awareness of today and the promises of tomorrow, without separating them, but feeling them as a unified and living fact, in understanding meaning. Bringing history into the project would give the sense of eternity that otherwise would not be perceptible in any other way; giving the awareness that

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chi e nuovi, andranno a formare la complessità della nuova architettura.

Luogo, storia, memoria, interpretazione, carattere, identità, composizione e progetto sono, dunque, le parole chiave di un procedere che a livello operativo e mentale si muove all’interno di una dimensione fluida e costante che non dovrebbe ammettere intermittenze e che dovrebbe lasciare intravedere ad ogni architetto e ad ogni allievo architetto, tutta la bellezza che in essa vi è contenuta.

Ed è per questa bellezza-verità, credo che in fondo si progetti e non per cambiare solo lo status quo del mondo, ma per quei pochi attimi nei quali ci appare chiaro come l’uomo sia l’oggetto e il soggetto di ogni nostro ragionamento e per dare un contributo, a volte minimo a volte indispensabile, ad un comune processo di trasformazione, essendo noi architetti, gli artefici silenziosi di questa piccola ma indispensabile scintilla di divenire. Un divenire che a mio giudizio è il senso ultimo del fare progetto e l’obiettivo finale di un processo molto complesso che conduce nella propria essenza ad un flusso perenne delle cose, ovvero che contiene dentro di sé la sfumatura della transitorietà e del passaggio e non la definitezza dell’irreversibilità, perché divenire, così come progettare, significa tenere insieme tutti i possibili ‘fotogrammi’ del passato, insieme a tutti quelli del presente e a tutti quelli del futuro. Divenire, come progettare, significa vivere nell’eredità lasciateci dallo ieri, nelle consapevolezze dell’oggi e nelle promesse del domani, senza per questo

things exist anyway, even if they have disappeared from the perception of the present dimension, makes the project understood as a simultaneous co-presence of times, where the present exists because there has been a past and because there will be a future. Such simultaneity gives the feeling of being in the world and of understanding reality.

Loving history means, therefore, resisting the prejudice, escaping the prevailing nihilism, liquid and boundless, in its absence of memory or even worse in its instantaneous and pre-packaged memory. Loving history means to love the narrative it brings with it, because it unties the knots, opens the conscience, reverberates a belonging, but above all opens up to the diversity of the new. For this reason, I hope that any ‘next layer’ will represent a possible base for contemporary architectural design, a layer from which to understand that history is nothing more than the possibility of feeling free.

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scinderle, ma sentirle come fatto unitario e vivo, nella comprensione del senso. Ecco perché mi piace mettere la storia dentro al progetto, perché mi dà un senso di eterno che altrimenti non sentirei in nessun altro modo, perché mi regala la consapevolezza che le cose esistono comunque, anche se sono sparite dalla percezione della dimensione attuale, ovvero mi dà la possibilità di percepirne il loro senso e quindi a maggior ragione estendendo all’architettura, mi fa intendere il suo progetto come una compresenza simultanea di tempi, dove il presente esiste perché c’è stato un passato e perché ci sarà un futuro. E il tenerli tutti insieme in uno stesso registro, mi dà la sensazione di essere nel mondo e di viverne la sua realtà.

Amare la storia, significa dunque, combattere la banalità di tutto quello che depotenzia il sentirsi vivi nella realtà, significa resistere alla decategorizzazione di un pensiero sempre più debole, sfuggendo a tutto quanto possa assoggettarsi ad un possibile nichilismo imperante, liquido e senza confini, nella sua assenza di memoria o peggio ancora nella sua memoria istantanea e preconfezionata. Amare la storia, significa amare la narrazione che essa porta con sé, perché ogni storia apre un nodo, schiude la coscienza, riverbera un’appartenenza, ma apre soprattutto alle diversità del nuovo.

Per questo, auspico che qualunque next layer, vedremo profilarsi come possibile strato su cui poggiare il progetto contemporaneo d’architettura, sarà uno strato dal quale capire che la storia non è altro che una possibilità per sentirsi liberi.

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the cable car to the western wall David Cassuto

School of Architecture Ariel University of Israel

The Jewish people are commanded to make a pilgrimage to God’s earthly seat three times a year, marking the festivals of Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot (Exod. 23:17–18 and 34:23–24; Deut. 16:16.) When they received this commandment the Temple had not yet been built, so the phrase employed was “in the place He chooses.” (Ibid. and elsewhere in Deuteronomy) The dates of the three pilgrimage festivals coincide with specific markers on the agricultural calendar of the Levant: Passover is also the ‘spring festival’; Shavuot is the ‘festival of the first fruits’; and Sukkot is the ‘harvest festival.’

But the Torah also assigns transcendental meaning to these holidays, thereby distinguishing the Jewish faith from most of other religions. Passover commemorates the transition from slavery to freedom; Shavuot celebrates the giving of the Torah; and Sukkot honors God’s beneficence in providing shelter to His people wherever they are.

Natural events thus become part of the yearly cycle of divine events, carrying both physical significance and abstract religious importance. The calendar is transformed from a sequence of seasons linked to nature into a sequence of festivals that link the creation to the Creator, and nature to the One who empowers nature. (Heschel, 1951) From the moment that God’s presence was focused in a particular place, the Jewish people were obligated to appear there as well. At first He ‘resided’ in the Tabernacle that moved from place to place in the wilderness—a deity always on the move. The abstract god is a revolutionary concept, not only in those bygone days but also in much later periods. But the people, who had been exposed to impressive temples of stone and marble dedicated to other gods, could no longer accept such an abstraction. So in the tenth century BCE King Solomon constructed a permanent sanctuary for God—the Temple erected on Mt. Moriah, which came to be known as the Temple Mount.

It is true that in the prayer he offered at its consecration (1 Kings 8:12–61.) Solomon sought to attach an abstract sense to the place from which human prayers would rise to the abstract God; in practice, though, it was a material sanctuary in every respect.

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Solomon’s Temple was destroyed by the Babylonian king Nebuchadnezzar in 586 BCE (after King Zedekiah rebelled against him). Some 50 years later work began on the Second Temple, which was finally completed in the fifth century BCE by Ezra the Scribe.

The Temple achieved its fullest splendor, in the Greco-Roman style, in the time of Herod the Great (first century BCE), less than one century before the Romans destroyed it in the year 70 CE. For more than 900 years after Solomon, the Temple was the place where the Jews were enjoined to assemble three times a year; all were obligated to appear before the Lord on Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot. Originally everyone made the journey to the Temple on these three dates.

As the centuries passed, however, this became unfeasible, and representatives of the nation’s three classes came to take the place of the entire people. Selected Priests, Levites, and Israelites (the rank and file) now made the pilgrimage to Jerusalem on festivals and offered sacrifices for those who stayed home.

The Hebrew word regel has several senses: it means both ‘occasion’ or ‘time’ (also in the sense of tempo) and ‘foot’. Because of the thrice-yearly journey to the Temple—in Hebrew aliya la-regel, ‘ascent by foot’—the word acquired the sense of ‘festival’ as well.

Jews streamed to Jerusalem from every direction, a human river of men and women. Most came from the provinces of the Land of Israel, while some arrived from communities in the Diaspora.

The demanding journey and exertion demonstrated the people’s devotion to the holy site.

Recently a new project has appeared on the scene: the Jerusalem Municipality decided to bisect the Hinnom Valley National Park outside the walls of the Old City with a cable car line that will transport visitors from a terminus at the old railway station (the “First Station”) straight to the Dung Gate, from where there is direct access to the Western Wall Plaza. Today, to accommodate the many tourists who visit the Western Wall, buses park in an endless line outside the walls of the Old City and discharge their load—up to 3,000 visitors per hour.

The Jerusalem Development Authority conceived of an idea that would render most of these tourist buses unnecessary: an extension of the municipal light rail system, now under construction, from the center of town to the Western Wall. However, many years would pass before this plan could be implemented, because of the complex and awkward procedures of the local and district planning authorities, not to mention the archaeological context through which the rails would pass. The Authority then had a brainstorm: transport the flood of tourists via cable car which would serve both the Western Wall and the Kedem Tourist Center planned for the slopes of the City of David.

But even if the Authority could overcome all the objections to such an unconventional idea, it would take many years for this plan, too, to navigate all the stages of statutory approval. At which

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point the project’s sponsors had the brilliant idea of bypassing the statutory approval process.

In recent years the Israeli government has discovered that legally mandated zoning and planning processes impede rapid development. But instead of trying to simplify the process, which slows all forms of urban development, the State decided to create a faster, alternative route, mainly intended to facilitate transportation projects. Accordingly, the Government drafted National Infrastructures Plan 86, which makes it possible to shortcut the planning of infrastructure projects (mainly transportation) defined as ‘national’.

The agency behind the cable car project is the Tourism Ministry, not the Transport Ministry.

The latter has not asked to expedite the Western Wall cable car project as part of Plan 86. It is the Tourism Ministry that is in a great hurry to get it going, clearly demonstrating the reason for bypassing the normal planning processes provided for by law.

Circumventing the statutory procedure means that the public is deprived of the opportunity to file objections. In the case of the Western Wall cable car, this was no accident; the project’s sponsors understood that public opposition could sink the proposal. This evasion of the statutory process is an assault on democracy. In what follows I present a number of serious problems posed by the cable car project.

The National Park: When Jerusalem was united after the Six-Day War, the Israeli government decided to create a greenbelt around the walls of the Old City. This parkland is relatively wide in the streambeds— the Kidron on the east and the Hinnom Valley on the south. Other sections had been part of the no-man’s land between the Jordanian and Israeli sections of the city prior to 1967 (and consequently remained untouched).

Towering conspicuously in the midst of the National Park, the Old City walls, constructed by Suleiman the Magnificent in the sixteenth century, encase 870 dunams (220 acres) of built land. Until Jerusalem residents began building homes outside the walls in the nineteenth century, the land surrounding the city was empty (and unsafe), although some of it was farmed by nearby villages.

The National Park contains important antiquities and holy places—the Southern Wall excavations, Mt. Zion with its many churches, and Akeldama at the junction of the Kidron and Hinnom valleys.

The Hinnom Valley and part of the Kidron Valley are enclosed by cliffs that rise to a height of over ten meters – a conspicuous feature in the landscape – and house countless antiquities and burial caves. Vegetation sprouts from the walls on the west and north sides of the Old City. In the

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Kidron Valley there are mainly walls and cliffs; in the Hinnom Valley there are olive groves and the remains of a natural copse, with large and handsome mastic trees and spiny hawthorn. Within the park boundaries there are a number of tourist attractions that charge for admission, run by the Elad organization under contract from the National Parks and Nature Reserves Authority.

These include the Siloam Tunnel and the City of David excavations.

The National Park was established pursuant to Urban Zoning Plan AM/6, approved in August 1970. The area covered by this plan includes four enclaves between Mt. Zion and the City of David: David’s Tomb, the Siloam Pool, the Karaite cemetery, and other burial places on the eastern slopes of Mt. Zion, as well as another compound northeast of the Siloam Pool. All of these have the status of an approved national park. Two other parcels were excluded—the Karaite cemetery on the outskirts of Abu Tor, and the cemetery that extends from Ophel Road to the Kidron Valley, between Yad Avshalom on the north and the City of David on the south. These cemeteries are sacred ground with religious significance for Rabbanite and Karaite Jews. The church compounds on Mt. Zion and the Muslim cemeteries east of the Old City were officially included in the park. Also included in the National Park are the walls themselves, including those of the Temple Mount, though the park’s territory does not include areas inside the walls of the Old City.

Today there are plans to extend the national park, especially around the churches on the slopes of the Mount of Olives. Given the great political and religious sensitivity of such a move, it is not clear whether or when this plan will be submitted to the planning authorities.

The cable car project would involve 15 pylons, 11 of them erected within the national park, which, as noted, is supposed to be strictly protected against development and construction. The pylons are to rise to a height of five to eight stories (26 meters). Pylon C would stand right next to David’s Tomb and the Coenaculum—a true eyesore.

Tradition has it that when the British High Commissioner left the country in 1948, he said, with reference to Jerusalem, “We are entrusting you with an asset that has no parallel in the world.

Preserve it!” We do not need to be reminded by the High Commissioner that Jerusalem is, was, and always will be the ultimate treasure of the Jewish people. Who will guard it, if we betray the trust confided to us by history?

The tour-group problem: Tour guides generally lead groups of 40. Each cable car cabin has a capacity of eight to ten persons. The tour guides cannot split themselves into four or five in order to accompany the group members in each cabin; nor will they be able to control entry to the cable car, so members of a different group could be mixed in with theirs.

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Image of the project from the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA), the town planning legislation.

The result is that a fair amount of time will be spent until they manage to reassemble their group after they leave the cabins. As a result, the cable car segment of the trip between the bus parking lot at the First Station and the Western Wall, which is the tour’s destination, is liable to produce severe complications. Furthermore, guides will not be able to address their entire group while they are using the cable car.

The Jewish element: Jerusalem, and especially its holy places, ought to be ‘conquered’ by means of a physical effort that expresses the yearnings for this holy place. To descend as if on ‘angel’s wings’ would contradict the essential Jewish concept of the ‘earthly Jerusalem’ and of pilgrimage as an ‘ascent by foot’—the need to exercise one’s limbs in order to reach the lofty goal.

I served as architectural advisor to the Minister of Religions for five years, at a time when the thorny issue of the design of the Western Wall Plaza topped the agenda. Various proposals were advanced, including some that viewed the Wall as a site with social, economic, and touristic

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significance. But the Western Wall has a transcendental meaning and must not be turned into a multipurpose meeting place. All the proposals were rejected out of hand, and the Western Wall remained the focus of prayer, meditation, and dreams.

Observance of the Sabbath and festivals: In light of Jerusalem’s large observant population and the status of the Temple Mount for our people, the cable car is highly unlikely to run on Sabbaths and Jewish festivals. At which point we would wonder :«What was the point of it all?» On the Sabbath and festivals, which are the most important days for visitors, a state-owned transportation system would not operate—and if it did, it would produce no end of additional friction and could even bring down national governments.

Accessibility: Constructing a transport system that would keep buses away from the Dung Gate is a strange idea. Tourist buses would have to park at the First Station, which would also be the point of departure for everyone who wishes to board the cable car. There simply is no room there for so many vehicles. The result would be a massive bottleneck on a major urban thoroughfare, due to the traffic jam outside the First Station.

Yet much better alternatives are being planned, such as a privately operated shuttle system that would pick up visitors to the Western Wall from all over town and would not require long-term parking spaces along the Old City walls; the Golden Line of the light-rail system, which would provide access from various places in the city (but is still far from realization because it has not been approved for shortcutting the statutory planning process); and other ideas that are on the books and will be implemented someday. We can add that the cable car project is not part of the Master Transportation Plan for Jerusalem. If it were, the National Infrastructures Commission would have the right to intervene. But because the request is related to tourism, that commission has no standing in the matter. There is no reason why the project should not undergo the full statutory process, like every other project. If it did, those who have the best interests of Jerusalem at heart would have a forum to which they could appeal.

To avoid the legal roadblocks, those behind the cable car project turned to other agencies to approve it—the Public Housing Cabinet, which was overjoyed to give its blessing (though what the cable car has to do with public housing is beyond me; and we can only wonder that they didn’t ask the Youth Movements Council for its approval, too).

the cable car to the western wall • david cassuto

Capacity: The Western Wall Plaza has a finite area and a finite capacity: the entire plaza can hold a maximum of 5,600 men and women. The cable car could bring 3,000 persons an hour (according to its sponsors)—in addition to those who reach the Plaza by other means. Such an intensive injection of visitors would double the number of persons who come there now. No thought has been given to the capacity limit. The terrible crush produced would require the addition of police posts, emergency vehicles, and security personnel. At times it might be necessary to shut other access routes to keep the pressure from becoming intolerable. But the entries that would be blocked are precisely those used by religious Jews who come to the Western Wall not as tourists, but to pray. The path taken by the thousands who walk to the Western Wall from the neighborhoods north of the Old City would be blocked.

Harm to residents: The cable car will pass over vernacular neighborhoods typical of historical Jerusalem. But the residents of these neighborhoods are likely to move away because of the frightening shadow of the cable car that passes over them, close to mosques, churches, and synagogues. The safety of the residents and institutions would be undermined and they would be victimized by physical, acoustic, and visual blight. Many of the city’s Muslim residents already believe that the Jewish state is hostile to them (and call on the international community to come to their aid). The Jewish state (and not foreign actors) must prove that it takes maximum account of their concerns.

Furthermore, neither the residents nor the institutions were asked for their consent to the cable car’s invasion of their property (property rights are not restricted to ground level but extend upward with no limit).

In a democratic country, the public has the right to appeal to the authorities, and they are required to publish the plans for projects so that the public can examine them and object if it so chooses. The present infringement of the public’s rights in favor of the asserted touristic profit (never conclusively demonstrated) has not been studied or addressed. I wonder if the true aim of the cable car is not to facilitate access to the Western Wall, but rather to bring crowds to Elad’s disproportionate Kedem tourist center. With a total area of 16,000 sq.m. (4 acres), and rising to a height of seven stories (even higher with the cable car), the center will conceal the Old City walls. It is hard to imagine what the sponsors plan to do with all that floor space.

I conclude with some of my own musings as I confront a problematic project like this.

Every Jewish child was taught about the goal of visiting the site of the Holy Temple, even when living in the Diaspora, and even 70 generations after the Temple was destroyed.

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Image of the project from the Jerusalem Development Authority (JDA), the town planning legislation.

I too remember that when I was a boy of six, I used to walk around in Florence with my father (a physician and a rabbi), who devoted every Sunday (in addition to Shabbat of course) to his children, because that was his day off from the hospital. He introduced us to the city’s many artistic treasures, mainly those produced by the great Florentine artists of the Renaissance. He would pause with us in front of the Gates of Paradise, the gilded bronze reliefs created by Lorenzo Ghiberti for the East Door of the Baptistery (outside the Cathedral of Santa Maria del Fiore), which depict scenes from the Bible. Here he would direct my attention to the panel that shows the meeting between King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. «Look, David» he would whisper «They are standing outside the Temple in Jerusalem ». Then he’d add: « We’ll go there too, some day ». We would continue on to the Palazzo Vecchio, where he would point to one of the arches that support the ceiling and its portrayal of a walled city «That’s Jerusalem!». And, of course there was the prayer « Next Year in Jerusalem» recited on holidays. Jerusalem was in our hearts every day.

When I arrived in this country without my parents (they had been arrested by the Nazis and their Fascist helpers; I was hidden by a compassionate Christian family), I found myself in Jerusalem,

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the city of our dreams! I was in the Land of Israel! A sun-swept land, radiating freedom and serenity, the very land we had dreamed of while in exile was now suddenly a living reality. Within three years the state was proclaimed—who could have imagined that five years earlier?

Alas, the euphoria was short-lived. War broke out. All the Arab states, with their tens of millions of people, arrayed against scarcely half a million Jews. But our dream of the land and the city inspired us, and we overcame them all.

My mother returned from the concentration camp and rejoined us in Jerusalem—but not for long. She was killed during the War of Independence, one of the 77 persons massacred in an Arab attack on a convoy of medical personnel en route to the Hadassah Hospital on Mt. Scopus.

The State of Israel was born a month after her death. Less than 20 years later, Jerusalem was reunited. Our dream came true. What jubilation: the Old City, the Temple Mount, the Western Wall… In two short decades history had been reversed.

As a professional architect I was cognizant of the responsibility that befell me and my colleagues, to safeguard this marvelous gem that had been returned to us.

The euphoria went too far, and Israelis lost their sense of proportion. But now that Jerusalem is ours, why should we turn it into a poor imitation of New York, Las Vegas, or even Paris?

We forget that now we are Jerusalem. It is up to our cultural and professional conscience to make sure that it remains the Jerusalem we saw in our dreams.

Today, however, massive towers are growing skyward, dwarfing the city’s history, dwarfing the vision. And as if this were not enough, now, as mentioned, we have a plan to build a cable car to carry the pilgrims, not by foot but flying through the air like angels down to the Western Wall Plaza.

A hundred years ago, Ronald Storrs, the first governor of Jerusalem under the British Mandate, founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society. He understood that Jerusalem was not like any other city.

At the end of the Ottoman Period, Jerusalem was in the midst of pure planning chaos, which threatened to destroy its physical and symbolic image. Town planning was devoid of logic and objective criteria.

Before the British arrived, there was no vision behind Jerusalem’s urban planning and no attention was paid to the city’s global significance. There was no comprehensive view and no development policy that could express Jerusalem’s local and universal values, as an iconic city, as a historical world city, and as the spiritual goal of billions of the faithful all over the monotheistic world. Neither was there any consideration of the needs of the residents and diverse communities that composed the city’s population in those days.

Today, even though almost three generations have passed since the end of the Mandate, we face a similar dilemma. The concept of sustainable environmental planning has become a key feature

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of planning all around the world, but it seems to be honored mainly in architecture schools and by responsible professionals. Unfortunately, the elected officials of contemporary cities are not chosen for their adherence to these principles, but according to entirely different criteria, criteria that stem from political goals and economic interests.

Those at the top of the local government structure lack vision—or at best have a very limited one.

In one of his speeches, David Ben-Gurion said: « Jerusalem’s value cannot be measured or weighed or counted. For if the land has a soul, Jerusalem is the soul of the Land of Israel ». This should be a beacon for our actions today.

What guided Ronald Storrs a century ago must guide us all. The motto of Storr’s Pro-Jerusalem Society must be ours as well, with emphasis on the last phrase: “Walk about Sion and go round about the towers thereof. Mark well her bulwarks, set up houses—that ye may tell them that come after …” (Ps. 48:13–14) In light of the above, a group of concerned citizens has gathered to act with national responsibility and create the Pro-Jerusalem Council – a professional, academic, and spiritual body with no political orientation. The goal of the council is to preserve Jerusalem for the Jewish people and for the world. The council will advise the Israel Academy the Sciences and Humanities, or a similar body with no political identification, as follows: The Pro-Jerusalem Council A hundred years after Ronald Storrs, the first British governor of Jerusalem, founded the Pro-Jerusalem Society, we are calling today for the establishment of a Public Council for Jerusalem, which will be dedicated to protecting the manifold cultural values associated with the city.

Just as it was then, at the end of the Ottoman Period, Jerusalem is today subject to planning anarchy that threatens both its physical and symbolic character. The reasons are different, but today, as then, there is no logic, no reasoning, and no cultural criteria behind the planning of Jerusalem. Proper planning for Jerusalem requires vision, an inclusive perspective, and a development policy that simultaneously reflects the city’s local and universal value, both as a national capital and as a historic world city that is the spiritual focus of billions of believers. All the relevant aspects must be balanced, taking account of the local residents and communities, and subject to general professional principles of sustainable urban planning.

From the Pro-Jerusalem Society until the present day there have been various initiatives to encourage proper planning for Jerusalem, to accord the city its rightful importance and meaning, and to empower the residents as its trustees. Like its predecessor, the Public Council for Jerusalem will consider every part of the city, from its most ancient streets to the newest neighborhoods,

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in the knowledge that urban development must relate to every element of a city and all its aspects.

Without making light of the political complexities that bedevil Jerusalem, the Pro-Jerusalem Council will be strictly apolitical, and will seek to co-opt architectural professionals, academics, intellectuals, residents, and representatives of organizations from the entire political spectrum and from the sectors and communities to which the city is home. The Council will also endeavor to set up an international advisory forum.

Accordingly, “we hereby announce the formation of the Public Council for Jerusalem”. The Council will serve as a professional and public forum for discussion and criticism of planning and development in Jerusalem, and will serve as an address for communities to express their opinions about the plans advanced by the planning authorities. It will promote a long-term contemporary vision for the city, one that reflects both its local and universal values and the obligation to its present and future residents.

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architettura: diversa ma non estranea | architecture: different but not unknown Cecilia Maria Roberta Luschi

Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Architettura DIDA

In questi tempi così a-sociali, imposti da una famigerata infezione a cui il mondo ha dato nome Coronavirus - Covid191. Mi sono trovata a riflettere su cosa sia uno spazio architettonico vivibile.

Le categorie principali di riferimento erano rappresentate dallo Spazio e dal Tempo, poi subito venute meno per la loro insufficienza a definire realmente cosa possa essere un posto dove l’uomo possa stare bene. Allora ho provato a eseguire una operazione a noi ricercatori familiare, ho ridotto i termini di analisi; già, il riduzionismo. Quindi ho affrontato la questione secondo due estremi stare bene e stare male in uno spazio. E con sommo disappunto, ho dovuto arrendermi al fatto che lo stare bene o lo stare male dipendeva non tanto dal luogo ove mi trovassi: cucina, salotto, camera o pranzo ma atteneva molto di più a cosa facessi e con quale animo lo facessi. Quindi non

1 Dal 9 di Marzo 2020, un Decreto del Presidente del Consiglio dei Ministri ha dichiarato l’Italia zona Rossa, per emergenza sanitaria e tutti i cittadini sono stati obbligati a rimanere nelle proprie abitazioni con la sola eccezione dei momenti per fare approvvigionamento di viveri. Siamo a giugno ed ancora non si è raggiunta una libera circolazione fra regioni e fra nazioni.

In such a-social times that a so named Coronavirus – Covid191 sadly famous pandemic is imposing us to live, I realized that I was reflecting on what a comfortable architectural space stands for.

To better understand the situation, I turned to two main categories represented by Space and Time, which immediately failed because of their incapability to define how a space where man can feel good should be.

So, I tried to activate a reserchers familiar methodology, reducing the terms of analysis performing: the redustionism Based on that concept, I tackled this issue through two extremes: to feel good or not in a specific space. With my great disappointment, I had to admit that the good or the bad feeling is not depending from where you are but from what you are doing or – even better – from the mood you have by doing it. That means that is not where, not when, but how is the most significant element, and moreover 1 From 9 March 2020, a decree of the President of the Council of Ministers declared Italy “zona Rossa”, for health emergency and all citizens were obliged to stay in their homes with the sole exception of the moments to make

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dove, non quando, ma il come risultava maggiormente significativo, ed ancor di più la modalità del come si agganciava sempre a un non ben definibile stato d’animo.

Dunque, l’operazione che doveva essere fatta in realtà era spingere il senso di “stare bene” al paradosso e osservarne le conseguenze.

Una primissima giornata di tepore, mi spinge dal salotto, un po’ ombroso e sempre uguale, verso il prezioso terrazzo. Il sole mi stava facendo compagnia mentre mi ero dedicata in modo estemporaneo ad una lettura un po’ fuori il mio campo di lavoro; no! non è vero! Non è così fuori dal mio campo di lavoro.

Eravamo io e Kandinsky, al tepore del sole, e discutevamo insieme su Lo spirituale nell’arte2.

Facevo osservare a Wassily come gli astrattisti erano in qualche misura l’avanguardia dell’asociale, inteso con l’alfa privativa greca. Evidente che mi sono presa pagina dopo pagina epiteti che qui non voglio riportare, tanto mi sono indignata, per poi convenire insieme che ci sono molte questioni in gioco e che le avremmo affrontate una ad una.

Alzati gli occhi dalla mia discussione mi accorgo che era passato un pomeriggio, ed il mio tempo con Kandinsky per quel giorno era

the way connected and linked to the not well-defined mood.

The needed resulting operation was to push the meaning of ‘wellbeing’ to the paradox and observe its consequences.

A first day of warmth, pushes me from the living room, rather dark and never changing, towards the precious terrace. The sun was keeping me company while I was extemporaneously dedicated to a reading which was a little outside my field of work; no! That’s not true! It’s not so far off from my field of work.

It was Kandinsky and I, in the warmth of the sun, and we were having a discussing on The Spiritual in Art2.

I made Wassily observe how abstract painters were to some extent the vanguard of the asocial, meant as the Greek alpha privative. Page after page various epithets, that I am not going to repeat, were directed at me. I therefore was outraged, agreeing that many issues were at steak and that we would deal with them one by one.

Taking my eyes off the discussion, I realized that an afternoon had passed, and my time with Kandinsky was over for the day. The days before that afternoon never passed and now time had disappeared, only the pride of

2 Kandinsky W, Lo spirituale nell’arte, SE, a cura di Elena Ponteggia, Milano 2005.

L’artista deve cercare di modificare la situazione riconoscendo i doveri che ha verso l’arte e verso se stesso, considerandosi non il padrone, ma il servitore di ideali precisi, grandi e sacri. Deve educarsi e raccogliersi nella sua anima, curandola e arricchendola in modo che essa diventi il manto del suo talento esteriore, e non sia come il guanto perduto di una mano sconosciuta, una vuota e inutile apparenza. L’artista deve avere qualcosa da dire, perché il suo compito non è quello di dominare la forma, ma di adattare la forma al contenuto

2 Kandisky W, The Spiritual in Art, SE, edited by Elena Ponteggia, Milan 2005.

The artist must try to change the situation by acknowledging the duties he has towards art and himself, considering himself not the master, but the servant of precise ideals, great and sacred. He must educate himself and gather in his soul, caring for it and enriching it so that it becomes the mantle of his external talent, and is not like the lost glove of an unknown hand, an empty and useless appearance. The artist must have something to say, because his task is not to dominate the form, but to adapt the form to the content

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“Rapporti” in Yehuda Halevi St. (Tel Aviv, April 2017)

esaurito. Non passavano mai le giornate prima di quel pomeriggio e ora il tempo era scomparso, solo la superbia del sole mi costringeva a rientrare, lui tramontava ed io dovevo rientrare in quelle stanze già ormai ombrose. Ma questa volta il salotto mi pareva diverso, ci stavo rientrando dopo ore, e l’ho osservato con attenzione, come se lo riscoprissi.

the sun forced me to return, as he set I had to re-enter those now shaded rooms. However, this time the living room seemed different, I was coming back hours later, and I watched it carefully, as if I were rediscovering it.

The appointment renews the following day and this time we’re in agreement, Art can’t be just retinal, but at play there are Form, color

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L’appuntamento si rinnova il giorno seguente e questa volta siamo in accordo, l’arte non può solo essere retinica, ma vi è in ballo forma, colore e un “io” interiore che sperimenta i propri limiti mentre l’arte espande il non limite. Ora una somma di limiti come mi ha detto Cartesio non significa infinito3, per cui ci trovavamo ad un’impasse.

L’arte può sperimentare il suo non limite ma è comunque limitata in termini di forma, colore, tempo; l’uomo sperimenta il suo limite indifferibile. Vorrei che il sole stesse più con me ma quello non mi dà retta, per lui io non esisto. Il sole non ha coscienza né di sé né di me, ma io di lui sì!

Caro Wassily l’arte non ha coscienza di sé solo l’artista o chi la contempla la ha.

In fondo cambiare il climax in cui l’uomo vive la sua contemporaneità è fatica sprecata, come far fiorire un bocciolo di rosa con le dita, un disastro. Che affermazione pittorica e al contempo violenta.

Riflettendo meglio si può affermare che solo pochi si prefigurano la bellezza di quel bocciolo fiorito e solo pochi ne condividono la preveggenza che non è magia ma solo cura di osservare il reale, è il dedurne, prima, le finalità.

A pochi è data tale sensibilità e gli artisti hanno il doloroso compito di esercitare ciò che sono: dei veggenti realistici.

and an ‘Inner self’ which experiences its limits while Art expands the limitless. Now the addition of limits, as Cartesio told me, doesn’t mean endless3, and we therefore find ourselves at a deadlock.

Art can experience its limitless dimension, but it is nonetheless limited in terms of Form, color and Time; it is mankind that experiences its undeferrable limit. I wish the sun stayed with me longer but it doesn’t listen to me, to it I don’t exist. The sun has no consciousness of itself and neither of me, but I am conscious of it!

Dear Wassily, art is not conscious of itself, only the artist, or who is contemplating it, is conscious.

After all, changing the climax where Man lives it’s contemporaneity is wasted effort, just like making a rosebud bloom with our hands, a disaster. What a picturesque and violent affirmation at the same time!

Reflecting on it more, we can confirm that just a few prefigure the beauty of that bloomed bud and only few people share the foreknowledge, which isn’t magic but only the effort of observing reality. It is to infer, beforehand, the purposes.

Sensitivity is given to few and the artists have the agonizing task of carrying out what they are: realistic seers.

3 Il Discorso sul metodo è la prima opera pubblicata da René Descartes (italianizzato in Cartesio) in forma anonima e in francese nel 1637 a Leida congiuntamente a tre saggi scientifici La diottrica, Le meteore, La geometria, dei quali costituisce la prefazione. Il discorso è quindi da considerarsi come «un tutt’uno con i saggi»

3 Discourse on the Method is the first treatise published anonymously by René Descartes (Italianized in Cartesio) and in French in 1637 in Leiden, jointly with three scientific essays Dioptrique, Météores and Géométrie, of which it takes on the preface. The argument is to be considered as «a whole with the essays»

architecture: different but not unknown • cecilia maria roberta luschi

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“Qualcosa sopra” in Ahad Ha’am St. (Tel Aviv, April 2017)

Siamo arrivati al dunque, un architetto è un veggente realistico, uno che misura il limite del muro per superare quel concetto di spazio tanto stretto ed angusto con il fine mirabile di raggiungere la realtà del ‘luogo’.

Il fraseggio continua su una affermazione per me ostica, lo spettatore è anche troppo abituato a cercare un senso, cioè un rapporto esteriore fra le parti di un quadro.

Ma come? Allora un quadro deve limitarsi alla sua cornice e piegarsi su se stesso in un rapporto bastevole a sé? Ma allora cosa diciamo a Raffaello che ci spinge dentro il quadro, che ci chiama a far parte di quella famigerata realtà,

We have reached the main point, an architect is a realistic seer, one who measures the limit of the wall to overcome the concept of space, so tight and narrow with the worthy aim of reaching the reality of the ‘place’.

The phrasing continues along a tough statement for me, the viewer is too used to looking for a meaning, meaning an external relationship between the parts of a frame.

How could that be? Therefore a picture has to be limited to its frame and bend over itself on a relationship sufficient to itself? What do we then say to Raffaello who pushes us into the picture, calling us to be included in that infamous reality, talking to that consciousness to which only man can answer, being both the artist and viewer?

A few lines later, my dear friend answers me and I have to say that this time we were in agreement, and he told me these exact words: “a well made painting… has a real interior life; and a great drawing is one in which nothing can be changed without destroying this interior life”. I equally think that an architecture project is completed when nothing can be removed and every addition is considered useless; it almost seems like a paraphrase, maybe Scarpa, but I don’t remember clearly.

It is here that the framework begins to have a meaning as a reference of a boundary pushed even further and the reading of the picture have to give space to feeling the picture as an assonance of colors or a composition by Bach.

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parlando a quella coscienza a cui solo l’uomo può rispondere sia esso artista che spettatore?

Qualche riga dopo, il mio caro amico mi risponde e devo dire a questo punto ci siamo ritrovati, mi ha detto le testuali parole: “un quadro ben dipinto… ha una vera vita interiore; ed un buon disegno è quello dove non si può cambiare nulla senza distruggere questa vita interiore”. Al pari, penso, un progetto di architettura è compiuto quando nulla puoi togliere ed inutile risulta qualunque aggiunta; pare quasi una parafrasi, forse Scarpa, ma non ricordo precisamente.

Ecco che la cornice inizia ad avere un senso come riferimento di un limite spinto oltre e la lettura dell’immagine deve lasciare lo spazio al sentire l’immagine come una assonanza di colori od una armonia di Bach.

Il muro limite testimonia un momento nel tempo che aspetta solo di essere superato dal momento successivo, un transito fra uno spazio ed un altro secondo un principio di servizio per rassicurare la vita che vi si trascorre e divenire un luogo sempre diverso, sempre in mutamento ma mai estraneo. Una avventura palpitante dove la geometria vibrante tocca la persona e non misura l’uomo, dove la luce ritma lo spazio interno per poter superare se stesso e divenire luogo.

Lo spazio interno per l’appunto, il tragico equivoco del movimento moderno che alla Zevi può procedere per “scatole interne”4.

Lo spazio, di Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi, in ARCH’IT seminario <http://www.architettura.it/seminario> “… Per imparare a capire l’architettura -affermava

4

The limit of a wall testifies to a moment in time that only waits to be overtaken by the following moment, a passage between one space and another on the basis of principal of service, to reassure the life that passes and to become an always different place, constantly changing but never unknown. A throbbing adventure where the vibrating geometry touches the person and doesn’t measures man, where light gives rhythm to the inner space to in order to overcome itself and to become a place.

The inner space, in fact, the tragic misconception of the Modern Movement which following Zevi’s approach can proceed through “inner boxes”4. Facades, as well, in the end become an interior; the interior of city, and therefore no concession to the whole, but only reductionism to poorly manage a part. What did the 1900s miss?

This is what I missed staying home, an exterior, an insight of the whole which could have given me the measurements of my vitality. My living space wasn’t a machine, it had to be an experience which renewed itself without becoming a stranger to me.

Having by now gotten to the epilogue of the text, I’m thinking about Wassilly who prefigured the depths, and he read it on his contemporary colleagues’ canvases, he saw the horror of the two World Wars and the triumph of Materialism.

This is the real point of my reflection, rather than reductionism, we have to fully rely on Art’s ethics and the artist’s moral, on the moral

titolo saggio • nome cognome

Anche le facciate alla fine divengono un interno; l’interno della città, e dunque nessuna concessione al tutto, ma solo riduzionismo per gestire mediocremente una parte. Cosa è sfuggito al ‘900?

Ecco quindi cosa mi mancava stando a casa, un esterno, una intuizione del tutto che poteva fornirmi la misura della mia vitalità. Il mio spazio abitativo, non era una macchina, ma doveva essere un’esperienza che si rinnovava senza essermi estranea.

Ormai giunta all’epilogo del testo, penso a Wassily che si era prefigurato il baratro, e lo ha letto sulle tele dei suoi colleghi contemporanei, ha visto l’orrore di due guerre mondiali ed il trionfo del materialismo.

Questo è il punto vero del mio riflettere, altro che riduzionismo, si deve attingere a piene mani all’etica dell’arte e alla morale dell’artista, alla morale politica e non alla moralità sociale, ad un senso esteso della coscienza di sé, un sé illimitato e finito capace tuttavia di concepire l’assoluto, ha ragione Cartesio!

Ma cosa possono pensare Portoghesi5 o PrestiZevi- occorre, innanzi tutto, comprendere quale sia la sua specificità, vale a dire in che cosa si differenzi rispetto a tutte le altre arti. Si capirà allora che a suo fondamento non stanno né gli effetti plastici, che caratterizzano la scultura, né ritmi e armonie, che sono propri della musica, né valori pittorici e chiaroscurali o astratti che sono tipici della pittura. L’unico attributo costante dell’architettura è, invece, la caratteristica di determinare uno spazio nel quale l’uomo vive e opera. Cioè un interno senza il quale facciate, decorazioni, colori dei muri non dicono nulla” 5 Portoghesi nella sua visione attuale, parla di un’architettura “umanistica” che rispetti sette criteri fondamentali: imparare dalla natura, confrontarsi con il luogo, imparare dalla storia, impegnarsi nell’innovazione, attingere alla coralità, tutelare gli equilibri naturali e contribuire alla riduzione dei consumi. Sul tema pubblica nel 2005 il saggio Geoarchitettura. Verso un’architettura della responsabilità

of politics and not on the social moral, on an extended sense of self-consciousness, a limitless and limited Self, who is also able to conceive the absolute, Cartesio is right!

But what could Portoghesi4 or Prestinenza Puglisi5 think about the poor architecture, an Art form for some, a profession for passionless workers to others; we can range from absolute masterpieces to some real daubs, overrated at the time.

If I’m interpreting it correctly, Portoghesi tries to describe the Modern Movement’s limits, maybe going the wrong way, however he absolutely feels the mistake or the dread of not being able to let architecture breath, which closes itself in a complete mutism agreeing with those historians who consider it as silent and passive6. Prestinenza Puglisi, instead, searches for the Stoà with the new possibilities offered 4 Portoghesi from his current point of view, speaks about an “humanistic” architecture which respects the seven fundamental criteria: learning from nature, comparing with the place, learning from the history, putting effort into innovation, gleaning the single-voicedness, safeguarding the natural balance and contributing to the reduction of consumption. In 2005 he publishes about this theme the essay “Geoarchitettura. Verso un’architettura della responsabilità” and founds the periodical “Abitare la terra”. In 2007 the course Geoarchitettura, taught by him, was activated at the Faculty of Architecture of Sapienza 5 Prestinenza Puglisi graduates in architecture in Rome in 1979 and he specializes in urban planning in 1980. He taught History of contemporary architecture at the University of Rome “Sapienza”. Director at INAIL, he’s one of the most active architecture critic operating in Italy. The invention, created by him, of using the web potentiality sending from 2003 a newsletter to the Italian architects: presS/ Tletter e presS/Tmagazine.

7 Controspazio is an architecture and urban periodic founded and directed till 1983 by Paolo Portoghesi. From 1966 to 1985 the periodical was published by Edizioni Dedalo from Bari. From 1988 the new edition, promoted

by Antonio Quistelli, Guido Canella, Roberto Gambetti, Luigi Mazza, Eduardo Vittoria, Luifi Za and of Gangemi Editore from Rome.

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“Scusa il disturbo” in Ahad Ha’am St. (Tel Aviv, April 2017)

nenza Puglisi6 sulla povera architettura, una forma di arte per taluni, un mestiere per mestieranti per altri; insomma si può spaziare dai capolavori assoluti a delle vere e proprie croste sopravvalutate nel momento.

Se interpreto bene, Portoghesi prova a raccontare il limite del movimento moderno, forse e fonda la rivista Abitare la terra. Nel 2007 presso la Facoltà di Architettura della Sapienza viene attivato il corso di Geoarchitettura da lui tenuto.

6 Prestinenza Puglisi si laurea in architettura a Roma nel 1979 e si specializza in pianificazione urbanistica nel 1980. Ha insegnato Storia dell’architettura contemporanea all’Università di Roma “Sapienza”. Dirigente all’INAIL, è uno dei più attivi critici di architettura operanti in Italia. Sua l’invenzione di sfruttare le potenzialità del web inviando dal 2003 una newsletter agli architetti italiani: presS/Tletter e presS/Tmagazine.

by the web, he however reaches instances which, if not desolate, are certainly losers in architecture’s emptiness, which has also lost the sense of Space and by now no longer knows what a Place is.

Form and color, used as frames of reference for millenniums, disappeared in a statement of a unconscious and asocial self. Architecture is white or without bricks; thin, thinner, a growing absence of walls, further away from the living corporeality of man, a more and more deformed cloud in the ephemeral game of tie rods that try to elude the unavoidable ‘gravity’.

Seems that some colleagues woke up from a mental numbness, screaming that now is the time to re-think the living, and that our houses are not suitable to be inhabited for so long, more so in a situation of great psychological stress.

However, they didn’t realize that they were falling in a huge contradiction.

How is it possible that residences are not suitable for living?

We should therefore acknowledge that the failure is sanctioned and that themselves are unfit to follow the concept of residence to let people live in a manner appropriate and adequate to their needs. The slogan-effect statement, prone to ride the wave of the moment, has maybe implicitly condemned the experience of CIAM and of the minimum functions; in short of the Modern Movement and with it also themselves, who were protectors and supporters of those principals.

architecture: different but not unknown • cecilia maria roberta luschi

sbagliando anche strada, tuttavia avverte sicuramente l’errore o l’orrore di non poter far respirare più l’architettura che si chiude in un mutismo totale dando regione a quegli storici che la vedono silente e passiva7. Prestinenza Puglisi invece ricerca la Stoà, con le nuove possibilità che offre la rete, ma approda comunque a istanze, se non desolate, sicuramente perdenti nel vuoto dell’architettura che ha perso anche il senso dello spazio e ormai non sa più cosa sia il luogo.

La forma ed il colore, strutture di riferimento per millenni, scomparse in un’asserzione di sé a-cosciente e a-sociale. L’architettura è bianca o nuda di mattoni; esile, sempre più esile, sempre più assenza del muro sempre più lontana dalla corporeità viva dell’uomo sempre più deforme nuvola nel labile gioco di tiranti che tentano di eludere l’ineludibile “gravità”.

Alcuni colleghi si sono svegliati sembra da un torpore mentale, urlando che ora è il caso di ripensare all’abitare, e che le nostre case non sono adeguate ad un così lungo risiedere ed in situazione di grande stress psicologico.

Essi però non si sono accorti di cadere in una enorme contraddizione.

Come è possibile che le residenze non siano adatte al risiedere?

7 Controspazio è una rivista di architettura ed urbanistica fondata e diretta fino al 1983 da Paolo Portoghesi. Dal 1966 al 1985 la rivista fu editata da Edizioni Dedalo di Bari. Dal 1988 la nuova edizione, promossa da Antonio Quistelli, Guido Canella, Roberto Gambetti, Luigi Mazza, Eduardo Vittoria, Luigi Za è della Gangemi Editore di Roma.

A smile can emerge when thinking first of all about Boccaccio and then about my father, displaced in a peasant home during the war.

Yes, the farmhouses accused of being spontaneous architecture and always heavily criticized because of their “waste of space” and negative impact on one’s health.

But who invented the term “spontaneous architecture”? Sereni would laugh about it and so do I. But then I reflect on it, and the materialistic sense of that affirmation emerges inexorably, which excludes the necessity of useful space to the individual, and forces only upon useful space to Man, man intended as Modulor, obviously7. I see the failure of a century that in addition to producing two World Wars, and two abominations of humanity, is currently acting upon another one, maybe more serious than the previous, thinking about the “masses” and not about the people.

If we deeply think about the matter of architecture, we may find ourselves to be as Diogene, that cynic, who was looking for mankind with his small lantern; in order not to disturb God who was demanding Abram to be a right man.

But architecture is “Substance of separate things” 8, separate from realistic psychics who 8 Prestinenza Publisi, cit. First problem: the attention to the standard man has led to forget the concrete man. Second problem: the excessive attention to the functional standards has led to a progressive knocking down of the spaces quality. Third problem: the ergonomics, which grows from the desire of rationalizing the industrial production, tends to subject man to the machine rules and not vice versa ( do you remember the Chaplin’s film, in which the laborer is a gear of a giant industrial system?) Therefore it creates a mechanic and oppressive space.

9 From Paolo (Letter to the Hebrews, 11-1) Portoghesi’s quote from an interview in 2006

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Dunque dovremmo ammettere da subito che il fallimento è sancito e che essi stessi siano inadatti a perseguire il concetto di residenza per far risiedere le persone in modo consono e congruo ai loro bisogni. L’affermazione effetto slogan atto a cavalcare il momento, forse, ha condannato implicitamente l’esperienza del CIAM e dei minimi funzionali, insomma del movimento moderno e con lui loro stessi, che di quei principi si sono fatti paladini e sostenitori.

Un sorriso può affiorare pensando prima al Boccaccio e poi a mio padre sfollato in una casa di contadini durante la guerra. Già, le case coloniche tacciate di essere architettura spontanea e sempre molto criticate per lo “spreco” di spazio e la scarsa salubrità.

Ma chi si è inventato il termine di architettura spontanea? Sereni ci riderebbe su ed io con lui. Ma poi ci rifletto, ed emerge inesorabile il senso materialista di tale affermazione, che esclude la necessità dello spazio utile alla persona e costringe al solo spazio utile per l’uomo, un uomo inteso come Modulor, ovviamente8. Vedo il fallimento di un secolo che oltre a produrre due guerre mondiali, e due abomini dell’umanità, ne sta compiendo in 8 Prestinenza Puglisi, cit. Primo problema: l’attenzione per l’uomo standard ha portato a dimenticare l’uomo concreto. Secondo problema: l’eccessiva attenzione agli standard funzionali ha portato a un progressivo abbattimento della qualità degli spazi. Terzo problema: l’ergonomia, che nasce dal desiderio di razionalizzare la produzione industriale, tende a assoggettare l’uomo alle leggi della macchina e non viceversa (vi ricordate i film di Chaplin, in cui l’operaio è anch’egli ingranaggio di un gigantesco sistema industriale?). Crea, insomma, uno spazio meccanico e oppressivo.

can be the architects, and therefore expresses a universal language that interacts on different levels and becomes a travel companion.

The attempt to find an “Identity of Architecture” as Zermani9 has been trying to do for years, ultimately corresponds with the issue proposed by Controspazio10, even though it has been lost due to a certain lack of courage, according to Portoghesi.

But it’s what Ridolfi, Scolari or Scarpa were searching for, and maybe it was also the way attempted by Louis Kahn. The problem therefore appears to exist, and it is felt precisely in Florence, which would have something to teach about the identity of architecture that everyone could learn from.

Living and being, how a being, become a conscious being and can it conceive a place and not a space? Heidegger, hard lectures, very Paolo Zermani (Medesano, 2 December of 1958) is an Italian architect. From 1990 is a full professor of architectural composition from the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence. He’s the founder of the conferences about the “Identity of the Italian Architecture” and the “Italian Architecture’s Gallery” of Florence. He’s taught a Master in Theology and architecture of churches at the Theological Faculty of the Central Italy and at the Syracuse University of Florence and New York. To deepen the issue of architecture are mentioned: P. Zermani (2013). Ricostruzione e identità. In: Massimo Ferrari. Ricostruire, pp. 58-67 Lettera Ventidue Edizioni.​ P.Zermani (2013). Il nuovo come ricostruzione del paesaggio italiano. In: Potsdam e l’Italia. Perdita e ricostruzione della cultura architettonica, Ed. Potsdam School of Architecture. P. Zermani, (2015). Cos’è l’insegnamento?. In: AA.VV.. Mantova Architettura, pp. 62-63 Polo Territoriale di Mantova del Politecnico di Milano.

11 Controspazio is an architecture and urban periodic founded and directed till 1983 by Paolo Portoghesi. From 1966 to 1985 the periodical was published by Edizioni Dedalo from Bari. From 1988 the new edition, promoted

by Antonio Quistelli, Guido Canella, Roberto Gambetti, Luigi Mazza, Eduardo Vittoria, Luifi Za and of Gangemi Editore from Rome.

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architecture: different but not unknown • cecilia maria roberta luschi

coda uno ulteriore e forse più grave dei precedenti, pensando alle “masse” e non alla gente.

Se pensiamo profondamente alla questione dell’architettura, potremmo trovarci come Diogene, quel cinico, che cercava, con il suo lanternino, l’Uomo; per non scomodare Dio che pretendeva da Abramo un Uomo giusto.

Ma l’architettura è “Sostanza di cose Sperate”9, sperate dai veggenti realistici che possono essere gli architetti e dunque esprime un linguaggio assoluto che interloquisce a più livelli e diviene compagna di un tragitto.

Il tentativo di trovare una “Identità dell’Architettura” come da anni sta cercando di perseguire Zermani10, è in fondo la questione posta da Controspazio11, se pur persa per una certa mancanza di coraggio a detta di Portoghesi stesso. Ma è quello che cercava Ridolfi, 9 Da Paolo (Lettera agli Ebrei, 11-1), citazione di Portoghesi in una intervista del 2006 10 Paolo Zermani (Medesano, 2 dicembre 1958) è un architetto italiano. Dal 1990 è professore ordinario di composizione architettonica presso la Facoltà di architettura dell’Università di Firenze. È fondatore dei convegni sulla “Identità dell’architettura italiana” e della “Galleria dell’architettura italiana” di Firenze. Ha insegnato al master in teologia e architettura di chiese presso la Facoltà Teologica dell’Italia Centrale e alla Syracuse University di Firenze e New York. Per approfondire la visione sull’architettura si ricordano: P. Zermani (2013). Ricostruzione e identità. In: Massimo Ferrari. Ricostruire, pp. 58-67 Lettera Ventidue Edizioni.​ P.Zermani (2013). Il nuovo come ricostruzione del paesaggio italiano. In: Potsdam e l’Italia. Perdita e ricostruzione della cultura architettonica, Ed. Potsdam School of Architecture. P. Zermani, (2015). Cos’è l’insegnamento?. In: AA.VV. Mantova Architettura, pp. 62-63 Polo Territoriale di Mantova del Politecnico di Milano.

11 Controspazio è una rivista di architettura ed urbanistica fondata e diretta fino al 1983 da Paolo Portoghesi. Dal 1966 al 1985 la rivista fu editata da Edizioni Dedalo di Bari. Dal 1988 la nuova edizione, promossa da Antonio Quistelli, Guido Canella, Roberto Gambetti, Luigi Mazza, Eduardo Vittoria, Luigi Za è della Gangemi Editore di Roma.

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“Rendering vs Architettura” in Yehuda Halevi St. (Tel Aviv, April 2017)

hard but they open the mind, as Portoghesi would said.

So what can a poor professor say, one who has little to do with planning but who has made the interaction with architecture through the drawing his daily bread?

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Scolari o Scarpa, e forse è la strada tentata da Louis Kahn. Il problema sembra quindi esistere ed è sentito proprio a Firenze che sull’identità dell’architettura qualcosa avrebbe da insegnare e tutti avremmo da apprendere.

Abitare ed essere, come un essente diviene un essere e può concepire un luogo e non uno spazio? Heidegger, letture dure, durissime ma aprono la testa, come ci direbbe Portoghesi.

Quindi cosa può dire un povero professore che di progettazione si occupa poco ma che di colloquiare con l’architettura attraverso il disegno ne ha fatto il suo pane quotidiano?

Possiamo affermare che la forma è stata abbandonata in favore di una porzione di essa, un dentro che non vuole essere anche un fuori, mentre Fontana squarcia le sue tele, l’architettura diviene smart, computo, tecnologica, membranacea e ignorante, nel senso di ignorare completamente cosa debba essere. Un’architettura che ha perso la coscienza di sé come il quadro senza più quell’io che lo definisce limitato ma con intuizione dell’infinito. L’architettura si organizza in un interno e si dimentica totalmente della sua presenza esteriore, della sua visibilità, si camuffa in un tanto improbabile quanto celebrato “bosco verticale”, alienandosi dal contesto; diviene inutile nuvola di vetro con un milione di ossa - tiranti che ne compromettono la sua integrità visiva.

L’architettura un interno nudo senza relazioni esterne ma solo successive asserzioni.

Dobbiamo convenire che siamo in un momento di svolta, da un lato un materialismo

We can affirm that Form has been abandoned in favor of a portion of it, an inside that doesn’t want to be an outside, while Fontana cuts his canvases, the architecture becomes smart, calculation, technology, membranous and ignorant, in the sense of completely ignoring what should be. An architecture that has lost its self-awareness, as the painting without its Ego that defines it as limited but with the intuition of the infinity. Architecture organizes itself internally and completely forgets about its exterior presence, its visibility, disguises itself in the “vertical forest”, as improbable as celebrated as it is, alienating itself from the context; it becomes a useless cloud of glass with millions of bones- tie-rods that compromise its visual integrity. Architecture, a naked interior without external relationships but only consecutive claims.

We must agree that we are at a turning point, on one hand a materialism worsened, if it is even possible, by a smart functionalism, on the other hand there’s only a sporadic, shy, and minoritarian research of the relationship between man and the Absolute, to be as “politically correct” as possible.

But if once the statement “It’s not the cowl that makes the monk” could be shared because it battled the excess of research of form achieved because of the entropy of thought of formalism, today we should claim the “The cowl makes the monk”, because of the exact opposite reason, we reached the formless.

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peggiorato, se mai fosse stato possibile, da un funzionalismo smart, dall’altro vi è solo una sporadica, timida e minoritaria ricerca di relazione fra uomo e assoluto, per essere più “politically correct” possibile.

Ma se un tempo l’affermazione “l’abito non fa il monaco” era condivisibile poiché combatteva un eccesso di ricerca di forma approdata secondo entropia del pensiero al formalismo, oggi dovremmo asserire che “l’abito fa il monaco”, per l’esatto principio opposto, siamo approdati all’a-formale.

Quelle regole grammaticali e lessicali sempre combattute dal movimento moderno, oggi dovremmo riaffermarle e definitivamente dire che il movimento moderno non ha prodotto alcuna città, alcuna società, alcun benessere per l’uomo mai riconosciuto come forma ma solo come misero modulo. L’uomo invece è una forma, anzi è la Forma, secondo cui tutte le cose vanno rapportate e relazionate. Invece ci troviamo davanti a Rothschild Boulevard12, una mirabile concatenazione di episodi modernisti che riescono a essere autonomi autarchici e nulla di più, che hanno avuto bisogno di un viale per inserirsi in una maglia urbana e che a loro volta sono stati soverchiati dall’allucinazione post-moderna delle altezze vertiginose che assertivamente ignorano la città per conquistarsi un elitario posto al sole.

Today we should reaffirm those grammar and lexical rules, always battled by the Modern Movement, and firmly say that the Modern Movement has produced no city, no society, no wellness for men, never recognized as Form but only as miserable modulus. Man, instead, is Form, by which everything is compared and related. We instead find ourselves in front of Rothschild Boulevard11, an admirable sequence of modernist episodes that manage to be autonomous, autarchic and nothing more, which were in need of a boulevard to insert themselves in the urban grid and which in turn have been overwhelmed by the post-modern hallucination of vertiginous heights that assertively ignore the city to gain an elitist place in the sun.

I’m talking about those skyscrapers of eye-catching shapes that obstruct the horizon, like in Florida, or that descend upon the other houses recognized as historical and thus “respected” in the way that they have not been razed to the ground and nothing more. Are we really sure that proceeding by interiors is the correct method to give meaning to architecture?

For better or worse, my dear Architecture shows a social and political vision and sometimes gets to testify ontologically higher thoughts, if its designer puts that throbbing

A Tel Aviv, è una tappa fondamentale per noi architetti visitare e guardare le costruzioni moderniste che si affacciano sul viale principale, e spesso si disquisisce sulla loro possibilità espressiva, con sorpresa ci troviamo tutti unanimemente concordi nell’osservare la debolezza di fare città, di queste architetture.

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In Tel Aviv a fundamental stop-over for architects like us is the visiting and watching the modernist construction that overlook the main street, and often we discourse on their expressive possibility, unexpectedly all of us unanimously agree on the observing the fragility of the city making, of these architectures.

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Parlo di quei grattacieli delle firme eclatanti che ostruiscono l’orizzonte del mare, come in Florida, o che piombano sulle altre case riconosciute come storiche e dunque “rispettate” nella misura in cui non sono state rase al suolo e nulla più. Siamo veramente sicuri che procedere per interni sia un metodo giusto per inferire significato all’architettura?

Nel bene o nel male, la mia cara Architettura dimostra una visione sociale e politica ed alcune volte arriva a poter testimoniare pensieri ontologicamente più elevati, se il suo progettista mette quell’io palpitante all’interno delle armoniche compositive che fanno della geometria un eloquente descrizione del creato.

Quel sussurro di luce che filtra tra le finestre è capace di creare un luogo mirabile dove l’uomo può, vivendo, immaginare l’infinito e cercare di conquistarlo.

Rimaniamo convinti, a costo di essere derisi che, l’Architettura parli e dimostri una visione sociale e politica sino anche a testimoniare pensieri dell’Essere più elevati, squadernando la verità fra i narranti e familiari muri.

Ego inside the compositional harmonics that make geometry an eloquent description of creation. That whisper of light that filters from the windows can create an admirable place where man can, by living, imagine infinity and try to conquer it.

We remain convinced that, at the risk of being laughed at, Architecture speaks and shows a social and political vision even to prove the higher thought of Being, exposing the truth between the narrating and familiar walls.

fascist-era built heritage: a walk throught the city of forlì Yair Varon

School of Architecture Ariel University of Israel

In various countries throughout the world, debates are conducted regarding monuments, buildings, sculptures, and works of art that stand out in terms of size and design, and also carry cultural and historical significance. These are works that represent chapters in the nation’s history, and historical figures that have left their mark on its identity and development. In the southern United States, for example, the removal of Confederate monuments placed in public spaces has come to public notice in recent years, especially in light of the political climate in which incidents of racial and minority violence have increased in number. The same phenomenon has been occurring in Eastern European countries. Many of the Communist-era statues placed in city squares were removed by the new rulers who came to power following the collapse of the Communist regime. Some were smashed; others were assembled in open museums for educational purposes. These are now used to promote a discussion about the past, its perceptions, and its implications, rather than commemorating historical achievements and personalities.

This phenomenon has also been seen in Italy (Battilani, Bernini, and Mariotti 2018). An article published in New York Magazine in October 2017 under the title “Why Are So Many Fascist Monuments Still Standing in Italy?” launched a public discussion regarding the legitimacy of leaving tangible remains of the Fascist regime in the Italian landscape. American historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat (Ben-Ghiat 2017) has alleged that while the U.S. has been removing Confederate symbols from city squares, especially in the south, and France has renamed streets that paid tribute to Nazi collaborator Marshal Pétain, Italy has allowed Fascist monuments to remain standing, while Italians “live comfortably” with symbols of the Fascist regime found in the public sphere. Ben-Ghiat claims, among other things, that many buildings, including the Palazzo della Civiltà Italiana in the EUR district in Rome that was built to host the World Exposition in 1942, are relics representing exceptional aggression, and yet are now considered icons of modern architecture.

These arguments have stirred debate among the public and in intellectual circles in Italy and elsewhere. In an article published on October 12, 2017 in the online journal QuiComo (Manuela Brancatisano, “Demolire la Casa del Fascio di Como: la provocazione anti fascista che arriva

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dall’America”), politician and art critic Vittorio Sgarbi claimed that statements about the illegitimacy of cultural heritage assets deserve condemnation. According to him, “regimes are condemnable, but not the expressions of the regime. A regime cannot be linked to a monument.

The article’s author sees Fascism as an absolute evil, and therefore every expression of it is absolutely evil. This approach makes no sense, because it means destroying all of Italy.” Other reactions were even harsher.

Italy’s Relation to Fascist-era Built Heritage These issues have preoccupied the Italian public for many years, mainly in light of the numerous symbolic structures dotting its urban landscapes,built between 1922 and 1943, under the Fascist rule of Benito Mussolini. Across the country, tangible reminders of the past (wall inscriptions, street names, buildings, and architectural details) are still visible, indicating a period considered by many citizens as a “dark stain” on the country’s history. At the same time, the wide distribution and large number of Fascist-era buildings and sites arouse curiosity and interest that can be harnessed for economic development, especially tourism. One of the most prominent phenomena in Italy is the transformation of “dissonant” cultural heritage assets (patrimonio dissonante) into tourist attractions (Tunbridge and Ashworth, 1996). In the process, historical and architectural landmarks are recast as cultural curiosities. This phenomenon was the focus of a study conducted in 2013 by researchers at the University of Bologna (Battilani, Bernini, and Mariotti 2013), that examined the creation and adaptation of tourism products related to dissonant heritage sites and rationalist architecture in Italy.

The purpose of the study was to examine the degree to which residents of the cities of Forlì and Predappio were acquainted with local rationalist heritage assets, and their attitude toward the development of “built heritage” tourism products and toward the area’s history (Battilani et al.

2014). Two cities in the Emilia-Romagna region of Italy were selected because of the significant change that has transpired in their image and their relation to the past. What was, in the 1920s and 1930s, a center and a symbol of Mussolini’s Fascist regime, has now become a region offering historical tourism activities.

The present research will focus on the actions taken by the city of Forlì following European initiatives.

Forlì, “Città del Duce” – Heritage, Commemoration, and Public Attitudes The city of Forlì in the Emilia-Romagna region has a rich history of settlement, dating back to ancient times. Over the years, it has become the largest inhabited city in the area and serves as

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Figure 1b Former Casa del Balilla, later Casa della GIL “Arnaldo Mussolini” A look at the tower engraved with the young Fascists’ oath

the capital of the Forlì-Cesena province. According to Zanker (Zanker 2000),Forlì’s historical and geographical background facilitated the change in its status in the 1920s, when it became a “symbol city,” with new buildings, architecture, streetscapes, and land usage becoming the means of shaping its identity.

From 1922 to 1943, Mussolini transformed the city of Forlì into a showcase of modernity, a kind of Fascist prototype, intended to prove the power of the regime and its acceptance by the population. A completely new urban center was built outside the Old City area, centering on an impressive new avenue called Viale Benito Mussolini (today Viale della Libertà). Other urban

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Figure 1a Former Casa del Balilla, later Casa della GIL “Arnaldo Mussolini”

projects developed in the city during these years included a new train station, a youth sports center for the youth movement of the Fascist Party (the GIL) (figs. 1a, 1b), an elementary school (named after Mussolini’s mother, Rosa), the National Academy of Aeronautics (now a school complex) (figs. 2a, 2b), an institute of engineering and agriculture, and a memorial monument to Italian soldiers killed in World War I. In addition, an industrial zone was established, and Italy’s largest military airport was built. As part of the development plan, large parts of the city wall and its historic gates were demolished and replaced by new public buildings and wide avenues (figs. 3a, 3b).

Forlì’s status as a “symbol city” of the Mussolini regime made it a major target for occupation by Allied forces during World War II. On November 9, 1944, the British Army entered the city. About a month after the British occupation the city suffered heavy shelling from the Germans. In addition to the many casualties, numerous buildings were demolished in the city’s historical center.

Present-day Forlì, with its streets, buildings, and architectural styles, is a kind of open-air museum documenting Italy’s 20-year-long Fascist era, and that era’s perceptions, events, and historical figures. The public and private buildings lining the city streets demonstrate the period’s dominant architectural styles: the eclectic style, the stile littorio (the monumental Fascist style), and

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Figure 2b Statue of Icarus (F. S. Palozzi, 1941) Figure 2a former Collegio Aeronautico Bruno Mussolini

the rationalist style. This architectural heritage was the work of the best Italian architects of those years: Gustavo Giovannoni, Cesare Bazzani, Cesare Valle, and others, manifesting historical, urban, and social values t​ hat lend the city and its assets the status of a cultural heritage site.

Since the 1990s, Forlì’s local leadership has been working to improve the city’s image, both in the eyes of its residents and for tourists. This activity reflects the need to strengthen local identity by providing information and tools that can assist residents in confronting their city’s past. At the same time it promotes the perception of Forlì as a cultural city with valuable assets that can attract tourists. This change of attitude towards the city’s heritage can be seen in the context of a more general change in the approach to the management of controversial heritage assets, which previously were often seen in a negative light.

One of Forlì’s first and perhaps most notable steps in this respect was the 2005 opening of the San Domenico Museum (a complex of five buildings, including a church and a monastery), which quickly became the city’s cultural center. The museum assisted in reshaping the city’s image as a cultural hub by incorporating a regional network of art cities (Castellucci & Leech 2018). A few years earlier, in 1999, the San Domenico Museum mounted the seminal exhibition “La Città Progettata” (“The Planned City”), curated by architecture professor Ulisse Tramonti. The exhibition focused on the heritage of rationalist architecture in and around the city of Forlì. The

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Figure 3a Piazza Saffi: general view

exhibition launched an unprecedented public debate, begun locally but reaching a national audience, regarding the Fascist regime’s architectural heritage and the various narratives associated with it. The discussion of the technical, stylistic, and aesthetic aspects of architectural works eased the public’s reluctance to engage explicitly with the historical legacy of the period in which these assets were created. After the exhibition, cultural activities continued on the subject of architecture: photography competitions were held, books and guides were published, and cultural meetings were convened to encourage local residents and the general public to take an interest in the city’s architectural heritage.

Dissonant Heritage Tourism: The ATRIUM Project Another step taken by the city in dealing with the tangible memory of its Fascist past was to join the Cultural Routes of the Council of Europe. This organization, founded in 1987, aims to promote a European network, as a cross-border phenomenon that represents human rights, cultural diversity, democracy, understanding, tolerance, and the exchange of information and ideas.

In 2009, the city of Forlì received a € 2 million grant from the Council of Europe to lead a

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Figure 3b Palazzo delle Poste e dei Telegrafi: detail

cross-border cooperation program in southeastern Europe called ATRIUM: Architecture of Totalitarian Regimes of the XX Century in Urban Memory. The project unified, under one title, buildings and landscapes that shared controversial values embodied in a “dissonant” heritage.

The purpose of the project was to foster a shared European identity strong enough to deal with uncomfortable aspects of 20th-century history, and to harness the “dissonant heritage” of many European cities in the interests of local development.

The project’s rationale was explained by Bodenschatz (2014), who argued that architecture as a phenomenon should be explored not only in light of ideologies and conceptions belonging to specific historical periods, but also with regard to broader time-bound themes such as ways of thought and economic and social theories. With this insight in mind, the project proposed to separate architectural products from the conditions in which they were created. This approach was affirmed in 2014, when the Council of Europe recognized the ATRIUM project as part of the European Cultural Routes Programme. The official recognition was based on unified criteria for the appraisal of the architecture of totalitarian regimes. The structures that qualified for this designation were to be large, prominent buildings having a strong impact on the

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urban landscape and expressing a lifestyle dictated and shaped by government institutions. These criteria define a form of culture (Baukultur) that characterized these regimes and should be analyzed in light of broad historical theories and developments.

The inclusive approach that characterized the European Council’s official recognition of the ATRIUM project as part of the European Cultural Routes facilitated the promotion of many events related to urban development, restoration and preservation of cultural assets, and tourism activity at sites representing Europe’s dissonant heritage” – a term coined by the EU. In 2018 the project included 18 cities from 11 countries in southeastern Europe (among them Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, and Croatia) that were subjected to totalitarian regimes during the 20th century and currently manage a dissonant architectural heritage (Castellucci & Leech 2018).

• The general approach was to blur the direct Figure 4 ATRIUM GO! relationship between the dates on which the buildings were erected and the architects, historical figures, and ideologies with which they were connected. Instead, project representatives chose to highlight urban day-to-day life, the building’s implications for city structure, and economic and social developments that were not unique to one state but common to all. This choice of neither erasing the past nor emphasizing it was in line with the European approach, according to which the “dissonant” events should be left to public-educational discussion.

Recently, the first part of the project was concluded, after 18 months of collaboration between high schools from Italy and Croatia engaged in the study of Fascist rule in the Italian cities of Forlì, Bari, and Ferrara, and the Croatian cities of Zadar and Lavin. The activity took place under the title “ATRIUM GO! – School Tours of Architecture and Power in the Twentieth Century” (fig. 4). It included tours, workshops, meetings, and discussions, as well as mapping and

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Figure 5 Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione o del Suffragio (1723-1748)

documenting historical sites and creating touristic routes. These activities were intended not only to promote socio-touristic experience, but also to impart historical information and to generate discussion among students and their instructors. The emphasis throughout the activity was on finding the means of narrating the local dissonant heritage and discussing its meanings.

It is important to note that in Forlì, the discourse that has emerged in recent years regarding the Fascist architectural heritage as a cultural resource for tourism development was facilitated by

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Figure 6 Symbols on the facade of a former public building

the political atmosphere created by the local leadership. In recent decades, local government has been led by democratic parties who consider the city’s Fascist past part of the agenda of promoting democratic discourse and strengthening local identity. This discourse does not deny or obfuscate the pas, but tries to confront its tangible manifestations still found in the public sphere (figs. 5-6).

Summary The term “cultural heritage assets” links assets as mediators of the past representing historical phenomena, with their role in the present, mindful of their survival in the future. This study highlights the representational aspects of these structures as expressing past values and conveying cultural messages, as well as their role of promoting economic and political interests, strengthening local pride, generating touristic experiences, and provoking curiosity. The study focuses on cultural assets associated with dissonant, controversial events, which have nevertheless been chosen for preservation and for the promotion of political interests, economic and educational activities, and tourism.

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The decision to designate buildings as places of historical-touristic interest was based on another characteristic of the term “cultural heritage assets,” namely – the distinction between the historical story expressed by the property, and its heritage. The buildings’ heritage is in constant change, adapting itself to the desires, needs, and perceptions of the present generation, and, as discussed above – the need to strengthen European cohesive identity and address the trends that call for differentiation and segregation. The fulfillment of this need was based on tourism and educational activities which emphasized the importance of each historical chapter in Europe’s heritage.

The selection of cultural heritage assets worthy of being preserved for future generations cannot be separated from the discussion of historical issues and events and their memory, including the role and design of the structures that represent them. Indeed, the purpose of the study was to argue that tangible cultural heritage assets, disputed because of their “dissonant” past, are worthy of attention, examination, and interpretation – as is any other tangible cultural heritage property regarding which there is broad consensus. The interpretation of similar cases should be based not only on the story of the past but also on acquaintance with the present – the contemporary local population, its social and cultural characteristics, desires, needs, and access to the heritage which the city wishes to pass on to future generations.

The messages which present-day European and Italian society wishes to convey are of historical continuity and the importance of each link for understanding the historical continuum; of unity, seeing all European countries as having survived the same difficult historical conditions; and a socio-educational message, according to which disagreement on the status of historical values does not preclude public debate, which is seen as a cohesive activity. In recent years, these messages have been used to combat the agenda of political movements in different European countries that emphasize difference and seek to avoid debate with their ideological opponents.

The European Parliament’s approach to this issue has been expressed in statements, exhibitions, and conferences held since the 1990s, following the fall of the Iron Curtain and the induction of various Eastern European countries into the European Union. This approach favors highlighting the historical facts, which are to serve an educational purpose. The past is taught in the context of a contemporary, democratic, and inclusive outlook. The historical truth is not presented out of context, and cultural heritage assets that express historical phenomena representing evil, terror, and suffering are not ignored or erased, but rather contained in the context of a strong local identity. This containment approach is viewed by the EU countries as a response to two phenomena: 1) The differences that have always existed between European countries, expressing cultural diversity and including nationalist themes. 2) New political ideologies in different countries that seek to emphasize differences. These two trends are reflected in the preservation of the

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tangible relics of Europe’s past, which represent its history as well as the legacy, messages, and insights that have characterized European society. This broad and inclusive approach has room for relics that recall grim and controversial historical events, but their heritage and messages express ideas that are undisputed, such as the importance of the historical continuum, the acceptance of different opinions, and the promotion of collaborative discussion.

Viewing European history as consisting of chapters, some dark and some enlightened, and emphasizing historical continuity as that which unifies Europe’s heritage and identity, European institutions call for preserving controversial cultural heritage assets. Furthermore, such representative assets are considered to have additional goals, such as enriching touristic experiences, developing the economy of European cities and villages, and strengthening European identity as one that includes complexities and controversy.

The approach of the European official institutions has also been adopted by the Italian state institutions, and the touristic projects they have developed express this approach to their heritage.

This is a development that does not deny historical facts but seeks new ways to introduce them to the audience thirsty for new experiences. The new approach “softens” the memories associated with the grief of the past, and is reflected in the selection of cultural heritage assets worth preserving. The attractions that operate in these sites do not overlook their historical uniqueness, but rather highlight their cultural, educational, and social messages.

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Fig. 1a: Former Casa del Balilla, later Casa della GIL “Arnaldo Mussolini” The former GIL building (named after Mussolini’s brother Arnaldo, a Fascist journalist and politician) is a milestone in the propagandistic design idiom of the Fascist regime, aimed to control the leisure time of young people and encourage them to engage in sports activities (architect: Cesare Valle, 1935). The building combined various roles, providing physical education facilities and culture and leisure activities. It is divided into three parts designed for different uses: a curved wing contains the library; a cubical wing, where a cinema hall operated; and an H-shaped wing housing an indoor pool and gymnasiums. The building faces Forlì’s main avenue (formerly Viale Mussolini) leading from the train station to the memorial for fallen soldiers. The building is noticeable because of the strong contrast between the brick-clad base and the three dark-colored rendered bodies.

(Photo: Yair Varon, June 2019) Fig. 1b: Former Casa del Balilla, later Casa della GIL “Arnaldo Mussolini” A look at the tower engraved with the young Fascists’ oath After the fall of the Fascist regime on July 25, 1934, a series of iconoclastic acts against Fascist symbols took place on the streets of Forlì. In one of these events, a group of young anti-Fascists climbed to the top of the Casa della GIL and removed the letters of the Fascist oath affixed to the building’s facade. Over the years the traces of the oath gradually faded. In 2009, extensive restoration work was done on the building, but the oath was not restored, though its letters can still be deciphered. This is a reflection of historical development: a relic attesting to an ideological oath taken by youth has become testimony of an act of vandalism as political protest. Today the building hosts important exhibits of totalitarian architecture, as part of the city’s attempts to confront its controversial heritage. The building also offers sports and leisure activities for the public. (Photo: Yair Varon, June 2019) Fig. 2a: Former Collegio Aeronautico Bruno Mussolini – the Bruno Mussolini National Academy of Aeronautics, named after the Duce’s son Bruno, who was killed serving as a pilot in World War I The building was designed by architect Cesare Valle and built in 1934-1941. It was originally designed as a sports academy, but upon completion, Mussolini personally inaugurated it and decided it would house the National Academy of Aeronautics. In the 1950s the complex served as a cultural center hosting concerts, conferences, exhibitions, and official ceremonies. Today the building houses two schools and a branch of the University of Bologna.

Photo:The building’s official entrance, used by the public during ceremonies and events.The entrance features a wide staircase and three massive pillars rising along the entire height of the building and emphasizing the portico, which is detached from the volume of the main building. Positioned next to the staircase is a statue of Icarus.

(Photo: Yair Varon, June 2019) Fig. 2b: Statue of Icarus (F. S. Palozzi, 1941) The statue is located in the front of the former Aeronautics Academy (ex Collegio Aeronautico “Bruno Mussolini”). It portrays the Duce’s son Bruno Mussolini, who was killed serving as a pilot in World War I. (Photo: Yair Varon, June 2019)

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Fig. 3a: Piazza Saffi: General View Piazza Saffi was designed to become a functional space for festivities, rallies, and official ceremonies of the Fascist regime. Many of the piazza’s historical structures were demolished to make way for new monumental buildings, whose purpose was to demonstrate the regime’s power. At the northern end of the square stands the Post Office (Palazzo delle Poste e dei Telegrafi, architect: Cesare Bazzani, 1931-1932), one of the most prominent buildings in the central square of the city of Forlì. The impressive building was built in an eclectic classical and neo-Renaissance style and features a symmetrical facade with a double arcade of arched doorways and two side towers. Mussolini inaugurated the post office on October 30, 1932 to mark a decade since Fascism’s rise to power.

(Photo: Yair Varon, June 2019) Fig.3b: Palazzo delle Poste e dei Telegrafi (Post Office, detail) Two circular marble pillars flank the sides of the building.

Each pillar is set on a square stone base and is topped by a bronze statue of an eagle.

(Photo: Yair Varon, June 2019) Fig. 4: ATRIUM GO! A marketing booklet for agencies that provide educational tourism activities to schools. One of the products of the ATRIUM project – a cultural route that follows the architecture of totalitarian regimes in Europe in the 20th century. The ATRIUM GO! project offers school tours and youth educational workshops on ‘dissonant heritage’ in the cities of Forlì, Bari, Ferrara (Italy), Zadar, Lavin (Croatia).

Fig. 5: Chiesa di Santa Maria della Visitazione o del Suffragio (1723-1748) The facade of the church at the southern end of Piazza Saffi was completed in 1933 by architect Cesare Bazzani. The facade, like the building plan, is reminiscent of the Church of Sant’Andrea al Quirinale in Rome (designed by Gian Lorenzo Bernini and completed in 1661). The inscription above the front door indicates the year of completion in Roman letters.

Beneath it is another inscription marking the 11th year of Fascist rule: E (ra) F (ascista) A (nno) XI. (Photo: Yair Varon, June 2019) Fig. 6: Symbols on the facade of a former public building On the facade of the ex Edificio I.N.E.P.S. building (architect: Cesare Valle, 1936-7), today the Forlì Bank located on the Corso Republic, a bullet representing the symbols of the Fascist regime can be seen.

(Photo: Yair Varon, June 2019)

immagine urbana di un patrimonio universale | urban landscape of a universal heritage Laura Aiello

Università degli Studi di Firenze Dipartimento di Architettura DIDA

Sul concetto di Eccezionale valore universale - OUV Gerusalemme 1981, Firenze 1982, questi gli anni in cui le due città oggetto dei presenti studi, vengono inserite nella lista regolata dalla Convenzione Internazionale del Patrimonio Culturale e Naturale del 1972 più comunemente conosciuto come Patrimonio Mondiale UNESCO. Siamo infatti agli inizi degli anni 70 quando l’‘United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization’ adotta la salvaguardia dei beni culturali come strategia cardine per il perseguimento degli obiettivi di pace prefissati nel ‘45 all’atto della sua costituzione proprio a conclusione del secondo conflitto mondiale. Da allora l’acronimo UNESCO diventa sinonimo di tutela di tutto ciò che si configura come bene di eccezionale valore universale, sia esso un bene culturale o un bene naturale come venne concepito nel ‘72 o che sia un bene immateriale, categoria che sarà aggiunta nel 2003 (ICH - Intangible Cultural Heritage) includendo negli elenchi tutte le tradizioni gli usi e i costumi pervenuti a noi dai nostri antenati che presentano ancora una volta

Outstanding Universal Value - OUV Jerusalem 1981, Florence 1982: these are the years in which the two cities are included in the list regulated by the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural of 1972, otherwise known as UNESCO World Heritage. The two cities, Jerusalem and Florence, are the subjects of these studies.

In the early 1970s, in fact, the ‘United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’ adopted the safeguard of cultural heritage as a strategy to pursuing the peace objectives already set in 1945, at the end of the second world war, in the year of its constitution. Since then, the UNESCO acronym has become synonymous with protection of every asset of exceptional universal value: both concerning cultural heritage or natural heritage (as it was conceived in ‘72), and concerning Intangible cultural heritage, (category added in 2003). The last one includes also all the traditions, customs and habits received by our ancestors who present those characters of universal exceptionalism.

But what is a cultural heritage? What does it mean to belong to this heritage? What does it

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quei caratteri di eccezionalità universale già menzionati.

Ma cos’è un patrimonio culturale? Cosa significa appartenere a questo patrimonio? e cosa comporta dover intervenire su di esso? Esistono degli strumenti che regolano tali interventi o delle buone pratiche di cui tener conto?

Per l’essere umano la memoria della propria storia rappresenta un valore da preservare, si tratta di un atteggiamento del tutto singolare se paragonato all’universalità degli esseri viventi ma necessitato dalla consapevolezza che le conquiste di oggi sono la somma di tutti i traguardi del passato e ciò vale dalle più importanti conquiste scientifiche, alla storia del pensiero umanistico. La stessa istituzione del sistema scolastico è rappresentativa di come per l’essere umano imparare dal passato significa preservare il grado di benessere attuale e proiettarsi al raggiungimento di nuovi traguardi. Ma non solo, la conservazione della propria cultura, di ciò che è a noi familiare, non è solo un atteggiamento razionale, è molto più profondamente un istinto naturale che ha certamente guidato la formazione delle più antiche civiltà e ha influenzato il corso della storia passando attraverso le guerre e il progresso dei popoli.

In tale ottica il patrimonio culturale di ogni civiltà è patrimonio universale! Metterne a rischio l’esistenza o trovare strategie comuni di tutela rappresentano il punto di svolta tra l’insorgere di un conflitto tra culture diverse o l’istituzione di una proficua sinergia capace di aprire un dibattito e uno scambio reciproco di

mean to need to take action on it? Are there tools to regulate these interventions or good practices to consider?

For the human being the memory of its own history represents a value to be preserved. It is a completely unique attitude when compared to the universality of living beings, but it derived from the awareness that today’s achievements are the sum of all the goals of the past.

This applies from the most important scientific achievements to the history of humanistic thought. The creation of the school system itself is representative of how for the human being learning from the past means preserving the current level of well-being and projecting towards the achievement of new goals. The preservation of its own culture, of what is familiar to us, is not just a rational attitude, it is much more: it’s a natural deep instinct that has certainly guided the formation of the most ancient civilizations and influenced the course of history passing through wars and the progress of peoples.

In this perspective, the cultural heritage of each civilization is universal heritage! Putting its existence at risk or finding common protection strategies represent the turning point between the arising of a conflict between different cultures or the establishment of a profitable synergy capable of opening a debate and a mutual exchange of experiences. If well managed, this common goal can become the key to mediate the most bitter political tensions, even prevailing over the most insidious economic

immagine urbana di un patrimonio universale • laura aiello

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Panoramic view towards the façade of San Lorenzo. (Aiello in Bini et al., 2016, p.137).

esperienze. Tale fine comune, se ben gestito, può divenire la chiave per mediare le più aspre tensioni politiche giungendo a prevalere anche sui più insidiosi fattori economici, naturali fautori dei principali conflitti mondiali.

Nel presente studio il nostro campo di interesse ricade esattamente sull’aspetto culturale materiale delle due città di Firenze e

factors, causes of the main world conflicts.

In this study, our field of interest focuses exactly on the material cultural aspect of the two cities of Florence and Jerusalem. According to UNESCO, “To be included on the World Heritage List, sites must be of outstanding universal value and meet at least one out of ten selection criteria”(WHC.19/01). In fact, since

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Gerusalemme. Secondo l’UNESCO “per essere inclusi nella Lista del Patrimonio Mondiale, i siti devono essere di eccezionale valore universale e soddisfare almeno un criterio di selezione su dieci”(WHC.19/01).Dal 72 infatti il Comitato della Convenzione sviluppò precisi criteri per l’inclusione. Ad oggi ne esistono 6 per il patrimonio culturale e 4 per il patrimonio naturale. Il centro storico di Gerusalemme e di Firenze condividono 3 di tali criteri (Criteri: II – III - VI)1. All’atto della loro inclusione negli elenchi esse dovevano pertanto: II. mostrare un importante interscambio di valori umani in un lasso di tempo o in un’area culturale del mondo, relativamente agli sviluppi dell’architettura o della tecnologia, delle arti monumentali, dell’urbanistica o della progettazione paesaggistica; III. rappresentare una testimonianza unica o eccezionale di una tradizione culturale o di una civiltà vivente o scomparsa; VI. essere direttamente o tangibilmente associate ad eventi o tradizioni viventi, a idee e credenze, a opere artistiche o letterarie di valore universale (il comitato considera questo criterio debba giustificare l’inclusione nell’elenco solo in casi eccezionali ed unitamente ad altri criteri culturali o naturali);

In aggiunta a questi, per l’inclusione nella lista dei beni tutelati, mentre Firenze beneficiava di due ulteriori requisiti (Criteri: I – IV) certamente garantiti dal suo status di città d’arte e dall’alta concentrazione di opere 1 I) rappresentare un capolavoro del genio creativo umano; IV) essere un eccezionale esempio di edificio o complesso architettonico o tecnologico o paesaggistico che illustri uno stadio significativo o stadi significativi nella storia umana.

1972 the Convention Committee developed specific criteria for inclusion. Today there are 6 criteria for cultural heritage and 4 criteria for natural heritage. The historic center of Jerusalem and Florence share 3 of these criteria (Criteria: II - III - VI). When they were included in the lists, they therefore had to: II. to exhibit an important interchange of human values, over a span of time or within a cultural area of the world, on developments in architecture or technology, monumental arts, town-planning or landscape design; III. to bear a unique or at least exceptional testimony to a cultural tradition or to a civilization which is living or which has disappeared; VI. to be directly or tangibly associated with events or living traditions, with ideas, or with beliefs, with artistic and literary works of outstanding universal significance. (The Committee considers that this criterion should preferably be used in conjunction with other criteria);

In addition to these common criteria, Florence benefited also from two further requirements (Criteria: I - IV)1 guaranteed by its status as a city of art and by the high concentration of architectural works of great value, and Jerusalem was also included because of the urgency of having to intervene on the real risk of compromising the property. In the 1982-report we can read among the Factors affecting the property: deliberate destruction of heritage; Housing; Legal framework; Management systems / management plan; Other Threats: 1 I) to represent a masterpiece of human creative genius; IV) to be an outstanding example of a type of building, architectural or technological ensemble or landscape which illustrates (a) significant stage(s) in human history.

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architettoniche di grande valore, dall’altra Gerusalemme veniva inclusa anche per l’urgenza di dover intervenire sul reale rischio di compromissione del bene. Nel report del 1982 si leggono tra i fattori che influenzano la proprietà: deliberata distruzione del patrimonio; Housing; quadro giuridico; Sistemi di gestione/piano di gestione; Altre minacce: perdita di autenticità storica (CLT-82/CONF.014/6).

Particolarmente interessante fu il dibattito per la richiesta di inclusione del bene nell’elenco del patrimonio UNESCO. Dall’esame effettuato dall’ICOMOS su richiesta del Comitato del patrimonio mondiale erano stati evidenziati ‘danni accertati’ per gravi distruzioni causate dalla rapida urbanizzazione e ‘danno potenziale’ non verificato per l’impossibilità di procedere alle verifiche sul centro storico di Gerusalemme, ‘per motivi che esulano dal controllo di ICOMOS’. A sostegno di tale inclusione si era schierato lo Stato Giordano che era stato il promotore della richiesta d’inclusione, preoccupato inoltre per la distruzione delle proprietà religiose e il deterioramento dei monumenti a causa della mancanza di manutenzione, nonché il disastroso impatto del turismo sulla protezione dei monumenti. Resistente all’inclusione della città fu il delegato degli Stati Uniti, che pur riconoscendo alla città l’alto valore universale dei monumenti e del patrimonio spirituale, sosteneva l’inammissibilità della richiesta poiché Gerusalemme non era collocata nei territori di uno stato membro, per cui Israele stessa avrebbe dovuto

Loss of historical authenticity(CLT-82/ CONF.014/6).

The debate over the request of asset’s inclusion in the Unesco assets’ list of was particularly interesting. The examination carried out

by ICOMOS and commissioned by the World Heritage Committee, revealed “ascertained danger” for “severe destruction followed by a rapid urbanization” and a “potential danger” not verified because of the impossibility of carrying out checks on the the historic center of Jerusalem, “for reasons beyond the control of ICOMOS.” The Jordanian state (promoter of the request for inclusion), in support of this inclusion, was also worried about the destruction of religious properties and the deterioration of monuments due to the lack of maintenance, as well as the disastrous impact of tourism on the protection of monuments. The United States delegate was resistant to the inclusion of the city. While acknowledging the high universal value of monuments and spiritual heritage, the United States supported the inadmissibility of the request because Jerusalem was not located in the territories of a member state, so Israel itself should have been give consent to its inclusion through negotiation with all interested parties. Despite the controversy, the city was finally included in the lists underlining that this inclusion would have no political implications and that under no circumstances should it have become a way of political claims or sovereignty by any state.

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dare il consenso alla sua inclusione attraverso un negoziato con tutte le parti interessate.

Non senza polemiche la città venne infine inclusa negli elenchi sottolineando che tale inclusione non avrebbe avuto implicazioni politiche e che in nessun caso sarebbe dovuta diventare mezzo di rivendicazioni politiche o di sovranità da parte di alcuno stato.

The Next Layer A distanza di oltre venti anni da tali dibattiti le due Università di Architettura di Firenze e per Gerusalemme di Ariel2, superando i divari politici ancora presenti nei territori israeliani, hanno deciso di aprire le rispettive porte a un dibattito culturale di scambio mettendo a confronto le proprie scuole e permettendo a giovani studenti provenienti dall’Italia e da Israele, di confrontarsi sui delicati temi della progettazione e della tutela in contesti di alto valore culturale.

E’ innegabile che tale tematica si sia sempre dimostrata particolarmente intricata e complessa. Volendo affrontare il tema dei centri urbani storici non è infatti possibile pensare alla mera conservazione come potrebbe più facilmente pensarsi per un’opera d’arte puntuale. Parlando di un centro storico si parla infatti di un organismo vivente costituito da differenti apparati e strutture in continua relazione e dipendenza fra loro che necessitano di continue modifiche per adattarsi al variare delle esigenze.

The Next Layer Over twenty years after these debates, the two universities of architecture of Florence and Ariel (for Jerusalem)2, overcoming the political gaps still present in the Israeli territories, have decided to open their respective doors to a cultural exchange debate comparing their schools and allowing young students from Italy and Israel to discuss the delicate issues of planning and protection in contexts of outstanding universal value.

It is undeniable that this issue has always been particularly complex. Wanting to deal with the topic of historic urban centers, it is not possible to think about a simple conservation as one might think for a small art object. Speaking about an historical center, we are talking about a living organism, made up by different apparatuses and structures in a relationship of interdependencies that demand continuous modifications to adapt themselves to changing needs.

In the project ‘The next layer’, this is the common goal to which architects, professors and students have worked, learning to understand the lessons of the past and promoting a future that responds to that expectation of freshness that we seek in the new, reaching new forms and spatiality able to welcome us by placing the space at the service of the community or of the individual who will live there.

2 Accordo di collaborazione internazionale culturale e scientifica avviato nel 2005, rinnovato nel 2018 con scadenza 2025. Università coinvolte: Università degli studi di Firenze e Università di Ariel.

2 International cultural and scientific collaboration agreement started in 2005, renewed in 2018 expiring in 2025.

Universities involved: University of Florence and Ariel University.

immagine urbana di un patrimonio universale • laura aiello

Nel presente progetto The next layer è l’obiettivo comune a cui hanno lavorato architetti professori e studenti imparando a cogliere le lezioni del passato e promuovendo un futuro rispondente a quella aspettativa di freschezza che cerchiamo nel nuovo giungendo a nuove forme e spazialità che sappiano accoglierci mettendo lo spazio a servizio della comunità o dell’individuo che dovrà abitarlo.

L’azione progettuale attuata in tali città offre un campo di lavoro particolarmente interessante. Fra i differenti fattori da mettere in conto emerge con forza la necessità di dover tutelare il patrimonio esistente.

Volendo richiamare le linee guida già individuate dall’UNESCO, per Gerusalemme “Uno dei principali campi di intervento identificati è il miglioramento della qualità del patrimonio abitativo e delle condizioni di vita degli abitanti preservando gli elementi architettonici ordinari del tessuto urbano come componente essenziale del sito del patrimonio mondiale di Gerusalemme. L’obiettivo è identificare gli strumenti per aiutare a guidare il processo di riabilitazione necessario, nel rispetto del carattere degli edifici storici”3.

Per Firenze “obiettivi della tutela sono il mantenimento della centralità simbolica rispetto al territorio urbano, metropolitano regionale, nazionale e internazionale adeguandolo al mutare delle condizioni sociali e geografiche di riferimento favorendo il miglioramento

The design action implemented in these cities offers a particularly interesting field of work.

Among the different factors to consider, there is a strong need to protect existing heritage.

Wanting to recall the guidelines already identified by UNESCO, for Jerusalem “One of the major fields of intervention identified is the improvement of the quality of the housing stock and of the living conditions of the inhabitants while preserving the ordinary architectural elements of the urban fabric as an essential component of the World Heritage Site of Jerusalem. The objective is to identify tools to assist in guiding the necessary rehabilitation process, while respecting the character of historical buildings”3.

For Florence, protection objectives are the maintenance of symbolic centrality with respect to the urban, metropolitan, regional, national and international territory, adapting it to the changes of social and geographic conditions of reference, favoring the improvement of habitability([…]”(Francini in Bini et al., 2016, p.7).

In both cases, the aim of the two cities is the creation of guidelines that can complement and integrate within the urban planning tools, offering references and margins of intervention to designers, to know how to move in order to achieve the identified macro objectives.

In the SPACE seminar (Solomon Project Architectural Cultural Experience), in the

3 Cfr. la scheda UNESCO della Città Vecchia di Gerusalemme<https://whc.unesco.org/en/activities/419/> (05/2020).

3

Cfr la scheda UNESCO della Città Vecchia di Gerusalemme <https://whc.unesco.org/en/activities/419/> (05/2020)

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della abitabilità […]”(Francini in Bini et al., 2016, p.7).

In entrambi i casi le città puntano alla realizzazione di linee guida che possano affiancarsi e integrarsi all’interno degli strumenti urbanistici preposti offrendo ai progettisti gli indirizzi di riferimento e i margini di intervento entro cui muoversi per il raggiungimento dei macro obiettivi individuati.

Nell’esperienza del seminario SPACE (Solomon Project Architectural Cultural Experience) nel biennio 2017-2018 e 2018-2019, gruppi misti di studenti italiani e israeliani, guidati da un team di professori e architetti di entrambe le nazionalità, hanno dibattuto e si sono confrontati su due temi primari: lo spazio cultuale e lo spazio culturale. Le aree di intervento hanno coinvolto in entrambe le città luoghi storici di un denso portato culturale (nell’accezione più complessa del termine). Sul tema cultuale sono stati sviluppati da una parte piazza San Lorenzo a Firenze sita nel centro storico monumentale con la sua facciata irrisolta e l’area mercatale e dall’atra la Bible Hill a sud-ovest della città vecchia, oggi riserva naturale e ‘luogo dei profeti’, simbolo di riflessione. Sul tema culturale a Firenze è stata trattata l’area del vecchio teatro Majestic e la relativa piazza dell’Unità, siti in posizione strategica sull’accesso tra la stazione ferroviaria e l’area di accesso al centro storico e a Gerusalemme lo spazio urbano a cavallo tra il quartiere russo e Jaffa street, considerata l’asse del centro della nuova città.

two-year period 2017-2018 and 2018-2019, mixed groups of Italian and Israeli students, led by a team of professors and architects of both nationalities, debated and discussed above two main topics: space cult and cultural space.

The areas of intervention involved historical places with a dense cultural background in both cities (in the most complex meaning of the term). About the cult theme have been developed: Piazza San Lorenzo in Florence, located in the monumental historical center with its unresolved facade and market area; the Bible Hill in Jerusalem, south-west of the old city, today a natural reserve and “place of the prophets”, a symbol of reflection. About the cultural theme have been treated: the area of the old Majestic theater and the related Piazza dell’Unità in Florence, strategically located on the access between the railway station and the access area to the historic center; the urban space between the Russian district and Jaffa street in Jerusalem, considered the structural axis of the center of the new city.

In each of the four intervention sites, the urban space has been materialized as a key for dialogue. Alongside the main topics of cultural and religious space, also sociological, urbanistic and compositional aspects were intertwined.

While Florence is configured as a punctual city from whose historical center the new city radiated in a structural continuity in which old and new coexist in a continuous evolutionary balance, the old city of Jerusalem was’ abandoned ‘to create a totally new one alongside.

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In ognuno dei quattro siti di intervento lo spazio urbano si è concretizzato come chiave di confronto per il dialogo. Affianco ai grandi temi dello spazio cultuale e culturale si sono intrecciati aspetti sociologici, urbanistici e compositivi.

Da considerare che da una parte Firenze si configura come città puntuale dal cui centro storico si è irradiata la città nuova in una continuità strutturale in cui vecchio e nuovo coesistono in un equilibrio evolutivo continuo, dall’altra la città vecchia di Gerusalemme è stata ‘abbandonata’ per crearne una totalmente nuova affianco. La conformazione orografica della Old City ha inoltre permesso di lasciare una fascia di rispetto costituita dalle valli del Kidron (ad est) e la Hinnon Valley (a sud). In tal senso le due aree israeliane, il distretto russo e la Bible Hill, si posizionano sul limite tra il vecchio e il nuovo a risaldare due sistemi strutturalmente estranei fra loro.

In entrambi i casi gli obiettivi strategici seppur complessivamente omogenei, preservare il centro storico, devono necessariamente attuarsi attraverso azioni differenziate dipendenti dai naturali processi formativi, paratattici o sintattici che le hanno generate.

Il centro storico di Firenze mantenendo la sua centralità necessita di azioni che tutelino e continuino a valorizzare il patrimonio favorendo però la rigenerazione del tessuto strutturale e infrastrutturale. Le due aree di intervento scelte per il progetto presentano infatti tematiche di riflessione rimaste ancora irrisolte.

The orographic conformation of the Old City has also made it possible to leave a small buffer zone make up by the Kidron (on the east) and the Hinnon (on the south) Valleys. In this sense, the two Israeli areas, the Russian district and the Bible Hill, are positioned on the boundary between the old and the new to resold two systems that are structurally foreign to each other.

In both cases the strategic objectives, even if homogeneously organized (i.e. preserving the historical center) must be implemented through differentiated actions dependent on those natural processes -paratactic or syntactic- that have generated them.

The historic center of Florence, maintaining its centrality, requires actions to protect and to enhance the heritage, favoring however the regeneration of the structural and infrastructural fabric. In fact, the two areas of intervention chosen for the project still present issues of reflections not yet solved. The construction of the railway line at the end of the 19th century and the construction of the station in 1929 constitutes a new access point to the city. This represents a moment of reflection on the relationship between new and old in an area where the historical cultural vocation must dialogue with the intense flows of tourism. The area of ​​Piazza San Lorenzo represents the place of a continuous and open debate about the use of urban space. For years the municipal administrations have been fighting on the right compromise between maintaining the

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La costruzione della linea ferroviaria di fine ‘800 e la costruzione della stazione del 1929 puntualizza la costituzione di un nuovo punto di accesso alla città offrendosi come momento di riflessione sul rapporto tra nuovo e vecchio in un’area in cui la storica vocazione culturale deve dialogare con gli intensi flussi di transito dettati dal turismo di città. L’area di piazza san Lorenzo rappresenta il luogo di un continuo ed aperto dibattito sull’uso dello spazio urbano, per anni le amministrazioni comunali sono state combattute sul giusto compromesso fra il mantenimento del mercato storico e la riappropriazione delle prospettive rinascimentali. La stessa Basilica priva del compimento della sua facciata ha ormai consolidato la sua immagine in questo prospetto incompiuto divenuto identitario del luogo ma su cui è stata lanciata la sfida di un moderno confronto.

Riguardo il centro storico di Gerusalemme, il report dello stato di conservazione del 2019 (WHC/19/43.COM/7A.Add.3) effettuato dal World Heritage Committee apre prospettive ben più complesse4. Tra le criticità evidenziate fin dal ’82 quali il forte inurbamento causa di un’evoluzione incontrollata dell’immagine

historical market and the reappropriation of Renaissance perspectives. The Basilica itself without the completion of its facade has now consolidated its image in this unfinished prospect (that is now the identity of the place) but on which the challenge of a modern confrontation has been launched.

Regarding the historic center of Jerusalem, the 2019-state-of-conservation-report (WHC/19/43.COM/7A.Add.3) made by the World Heritage Committee opens up more complex perspectives4. The critical issues of 1982 are repeated: the strong urbanization causes an uncontrolled evolution of the urban image, the progressive degradation of monuments and the building fabric attacked by strong tourism and the lack of resources.

To this list are added today: the concern for aggressive archaeological excavations classified as illegal practices; the worsening of tourist traffic and criticism of the Israeli governance project that is currently building an access cableway to the Old City. In this context, UNESCO has requested the appointment of a permanent inspector who can act as spokesperson for relations with the Israeli

4 Fattori che influenzano la proprietà nel 2019: fattori di rischio naturali; mancanza di processi di pianificazione, governance e gestione; alterazione del tessuto urbano e sociale; impatto degli scavi archeologici; deterioramento dei monumenti; ambiente urbano e integrità visiva; traffico intenso e circolazione. Fattori che influenzano la proprietà identificati nelle relazioni precedenti: effetti derivanti dall'uso delle infrastrutture di trasporto; governance; attività di ricerca / monitoraggio ad alto impatto; housing; Identità, coesione sociale, cambiamenti nella popolazione locale e nella comunità; attività di gestione; sistemi di gestione / piano di gestione. Altre minacce: fattori di rischio naturali; deterioramento dei monumenti.

4 Factors affecting ownership in 2019: natural risk factors; lack of planning, governance and management processes; alteration of the urban and social fabric; impact of archaeological excavations; deterioration of monuments; urban environment and visual integrity; intense traffic and circulation. Factors that influence ownership identified in previous reports: effects deriving from the use of transport infrastructures; governance; high impact research / monitoring activities; housing; Identity, social cohesion, changes in the local population and in the community; management activities; management systems / management plan. Other threats: natural risk factors; deterioration of monuments.

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urbana, il progressivo degrado dei monumenti e del tessuto edilizio aggrediti dal forte turismo e dalla mancanza di risorse, si sono aggiunti ad oggi la preoccupazione per gli aggressivi scavi archeologici classificati come pratiche illegali; l’acuirsi del traffico turistico fino ad arrivare ad incriminare la governance israeliana che sta attualmente progettando la costruzione di una funivia di accesso alla Old City. In tale quadro la stessa richiesta dell’UNESCO di nominare un ispettore permanente che possa farsi portavoce dei rapporti con le autorità israeliane sembra essere inesorabilmente caduta nel vuoto.

Non volendo entrare in merito ai complessi rapporti diplomatici tra le autorità israeliane e la delegazione UNESCO, dobbiamo osservare che all’interno del quadro critico evidenziato: se da una parte il forte inurbamento ha compromesso l’immagine storica della città secondo un atteggiamento progressista, dall’altro l’abbandono del centro storico ha permesso di rallentare il processo di degrado del bene evitando il conflitto con gli acquartieramenti religiosi ivi stanziati. Le stesse azioni archeologiche concentrate nel settore est della Old City mantengono ancora una connotazione mimetica poiché effettuate in una Gerusalemme sotterranea non ancora percepibile dall’esterno ma che meriterebbe certamente un’azione di controllo che ne monitori gli sviluppi futuri.

Proprio questo intricato panorama urbano, e il forte divario fra la città vecchia e la città nuova ha indirizzato l’attenzione delle proposte non tanto sul centro storico in sé ma su quelle aree

authorities, but this does not seem to have been done either.

Going beyond the diplomatic relations between the Israeli authorities and the UNESCO delegation, we must observe that if one hand the strong urbanization has compromised the historical image of the city according to a progressive attitude, on the other the abandonment of the historic center has slowed down the process of degradation of the property by avoiding the conflict with the religious quarters in the center. The same archaeological actions concentrated in the east sector of the Old City still maintain a mimetic connotation. In fact, they are part of an underground Jerusalem not yet perceptible from the outside but which certainly deserves a control action for the future. Precisely this intricate urban landscape, and the strong gap between old city and new city, has shifted the focus from the historic center to those hinge areas on which you can intervene more freely to connect the two different systems from the outside.

The management plan of the historic center of Florence In this context, the contribution made by Florence is certainly linked to the strong sensitivity with which we are used to operating towards the ancient city, in parallel the progressive approach implemented

by Israeli colleagues certainly offers a cutting-edge perspective with which to relate to experiment with new design solutions.

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cerniera che potessero riallacciare dall’esterno i due differenti sistemi.

Il piano di Gestione del Centro storico di Firenze In tale panorama il contributo portato da Firenze è certamente legato alla forte sensibilità con cui siamo abituati ad operare nei confronti della città antica, parallelamente l’approccio progressista attuato dai colleghi israeliani offre certamente una prospettiva d’avanguardia con cui rapportarsi per sperimentare nuove soluzioni progettuali.

In ogni caso è universalmente condivisibile che intervenire sul patrimonio culturale nel contesto urbano, volendone tutelare l’immagine, significa comprendere le dinamiche evolutive di quel dato tessuto, ed enucleare gli obiettivi strategici funzionali alla rivitalizzazione dello stesso o al mantenimento/recupero della vitalità che lo contraddistingue, ciò diventa prioritario se l’oggetto di intervento presenta quei criteri che individuano l’eccezionale valore universale.

Secondo tale principio l’istituzione da parte dell’UNESCO del Piano di Gestione viene incontro a questa esigenza configurandosi come nuovo strumento gestionale a supporto di azioni di politica attiva di tutela.

Precisiamo che il suddetto strumento viene introdotto come obbligatorio dal 2002 per l’inclusione di nuovi siti nella lista del patrimonio mondiale, e che dal 2004 lo è diventato anche per i siti già iscritti. Poiché l’UNESCO aveva

In any case, intervening on the cultural heritage in the urban context, with the aim to protect its image, means understanding the evolutionary dynamics of that urban fabric. It means also deducting its strategic objectives to revitalizing it or to maintaining / recovering the vitality that distinguishes it. This action becomes a priority if the object of intervention is a work of exceptional universal value.

According to this principle, the Management Plan set up by UNESCO agrees to this need and it configured itself as a new management tool to support active protection policy actions.

We specify that the aforementioned instrument has been introduced as mandatory since 2002 for the inclusion of new sites in the list of world heritage, and that since 2004 it has become mandatory also for the sites already registered. Since UNESCO had placed this constraint without offering a reference model, the Italian Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities, decided in 2003 to establish the ‘Consultative Commission for the Management Plans of UNESCO sites’ which developed the ‘Guidelines for Management Plans’ in less than one year.

This instrument is configured today as the first application act of the new Code of Cultural Heritage issued with the Legislative Decree of 16 January 2004, which entered into force on 1st May 2004, flexible and aimed at providing analysis, outlining objectives and strategies capable of promoting and conveying projects in a coordinated plan.

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posto tale vincolo senza offrire un modello di riferimento, il Ministero per i Beni e le attività culturali italiano, decise nel 2003 di istituire la “Commissione consultiva per i piani di Gestione dei siti UNESCO” che a meno di un anno arrivò ad elaborare le “Linee Guida per i Piani di Gestione”.

Tale strumento si configura oggi come il primo atto applicativo del nuovo Codice dei Beni culturali emanato con Decreto Legislativo del 16 gennaio 2004 , entrato in vigore il primo maggio 2004, flessibile e volto a fornire analisi, delineare obiettivi e strategie capaci di promuovere e convogliare progetti di tutela coordinati.

Nel caso del centro storico di Firenze, la forte connotazione rappresentativa, l’elevata concentrazione del patrimonio culturale, la vitalità turistica che lo investe, la continuità evolutiva tra antico e nuovo, l’interesse a mantenere la città al passo con i tempi e la consapevolezza della complessità che essa stessa riassume, ha fatto sì che nel 2005, su disposizione del direttore della cultura, Sergio Goretti, si giungesse ad istituzionalizzare all’interno della struttura comunale stessa l’Ufficio Centro Storico- Patrimonio Mondiale UNESCO responsabile, fra le varie azioni, della redazione del Piano di Gestione (Piano di Gestione del Centro storico di Firenze 2006-2008, p.15).

Ciò ha permesso che Firenze si strutturasse come banco di prova ideale su cui avviare una serie di progetti pilota mirati alla messa a punto di metodologie strutturate di intervento e “buone pratiche” replicabili in maniera scientifica

Speaking about the historic center of Florence, the strong representative connotation, the high concentration of cultural heritage, the tourist vitality that invests it, the evolutionary continuity between old and new, the interest in keeping the city in step with the times and the awareness of this complexity, pushed in 2005 the director of culture, Sergio Goretti, to create a UNESCO office within the municipal structure itself, to which to entrust, among other actions, the preparation of the management plan (Piano di Gestione del Centro storico di Firenze 2006-2008, p.15).

This has made Florence an ideal test bed on which to launch a series of pilot projects aimed at developing structured intervention methodologies and “good practices” that can be replicated in a scientific way and transferable also to other cultural contexts5.

In this context, the Florence Department of Architecture has promoted numerous researches to support the strategic objectives identified by UNESCO, becoming an active part in drafting the update of the management plan published in 2016.

Belvedere and Buffer Zone One of the main worldwide renowned topics studied within the partnership between the UNESCO World Heritage Center and 5 The actions planned by the UNESCO office in Florence include: Jordan-Italy, twinning project: transfer of good practices to Jordan (2014); Azerbaijan-Italy, twinning project: transfer of good practices to Azerbaijan (2017).

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e trasferibili anche in altri contesti culturali5.

In tale ambito, il Dipartimento di Progettazione d’Architettura di Firenze si è fatto promotore di numerose ricerche a supporto degli obiettivi strategici individuati dall’Unesco, diventando parte attiva nella stesura dell’aggiornamento del piano di gestione pubblicato nel 2016 .

Belvedere e Buffer Zone Uno dei temi di ricerca con maggiore eco a livello mondiale, affrontati all’interno del sodalizio tra L’Ufficio Centro Storico- Patrimonio Mondiale UNESCO e la Facoltà di Architettura di Firenze, è sicuramente quello relativo all’individuazione di una Buffer Zone per il centro storico della città 6. Si tratta di un concetto noto in vari campi ma divenuto centrale per la tutela del patrimonio mondiale da quando fu introdotto nella World Heritage Convention del 1977.

Dal 2005, le Guide Operative per l’inclusione di un sito nel Heritage List raccomandano l’individuazione di un’area cuscinetto di salvaguardia pur non rendendola obbligatoria. Da tale data molte amministrazioni in tutto il mondo si sono attivate per la determinazione di questa area di rispetto utilizzando criteri differenziati rispondenti alla sensibilità e 5 Fra le azioni programmate dall’ufficio UNESCO di Firenze si citano: Gemellaggio Giordania-Italia, progetto twinning: trasferimento di buone pratiche in Giordania(2014) ; Gemellaggio Azerbaijan-Italia progetto twinning: trasferimento di buone pratiche in Azerbaijan (2017).

6 Prof. Marco Bini: responsabile scientifico per l’Università degli Studi di Firenze; Dott. Carlo Francini: responsabile scientifico per il Comune di Firenze; dott. Arch. Carolina Capitanio: coordinatore scientifico.

the Faculty of Architecture of Florence is certainly the one relating to the identification of a Buffer Zone for the historic center of the city6.

It is a concept known in various fields but it has become central to the protection of world heritage since it was introduced in the 1977 World Heritage Convention.

Since 2005, the Operational Guidelines for the inclusion of a site in the Heritage List have recommended to identificate a safeguard buffer area even if it’s not mandatory. Since that date, many administrations all over the world have been active in determining this area of respect by using differentiated criteria that respond to the sensitivity and needs of the proposing bodies. According to the Operational Guidelines “The area constituting the buffer zone should be determined in each case through appropriate mechanisms” (WHC. 08/01 January 2008).

In 2008 The World Heritage Centre, in cooperation with Israel and Switzerland, has planned an international expert meeting on World Heritage and buffer zones (11-14 March 2008 at Davos, Switzerland).

In the ICOMOS paper we read that the main objectives of the meeting were review issues and questions useful in improving use of the buffer zone concept in World Heritage inscription and management. In detail it listed: “1. Review the provisions on buffer zones and 6 Prof. Marco Bini: Scientific officer for the University of Florence; Dott. Carlo Francini: Scientific officer for Municipality of Florence; dott. Arch. Carolina Capitanio: scientific coordinator.

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alle esigenze degli enti proponenti. Secondo quanto riportano le Guide Operative “The area constituting the buffer zone should be determined in each case through appropriate mechanisms”( WHC. 08/01 January 2008 ).

Nel 2008 Il Centro del Patrimonio Mondiale, in collaborazione con Israele e la Svizzera, ha programmato un incontro internazionale di esperti sulle Buffer Zone dei siti UNESCO (11-14 marzo 2008 a Davos, Svizzera).

Nel documento ICOMOS si legge che gli obiettivi principali dell’incontro riguardavano le questioni di revisione e quelle utili al miglioramento dell’uso del concetto di Buffer Zone per l’iscrizione nella gestione del patrimonio mondiale. Nel dettaglio si elencava: “1. Rivedere le disposizioni sulle zone e i confini cuscinetto nelle linee guida operative; 2. Esaminare i casi di studio delle proprietà del Patrimonio Mondiale, dei siti del paesaggio naturale e culturale da presentare al workshop; 3.

Esaminare i documenti di base del Centro del Patrimonio Mondiale e degli Organismi consultivi, nonché le informazioni analizzate attraverso il Retrospective Inventory Project; 4.

Stilare un elenco di Buone pratiche specifiche dei gruppi di lavoro del workshop e un draft decision per la 32a sessione del World Heritage Committee” (Cfr. Martin, Piatti, 2009, p.23).

In tale panorama gli studi per la determinazione della Buffer Zone di Firenze si originano nel 2007 all’interno del progetto Il Centro storico di Firenze in trasformazione. Rilievo critico per la riqualificazione del paesaggio urbano

boundaries, in the Operational Guidelines; 2.

Review case studies of World Heritage properties, natural, cultural and cultural landscape sites to be presented to the workshop; 3. Review background papers by the World Heritage Centre and the Advisory Bodies as well as information analyzed through the Retrospective Inventory Project; 4. Compile specific recommendations from the working groups at the Workshop and a draft decision for the 32nd Session of the World Heritage Committee” (Cfr. Martin, Piatti, 2009, p.23).

In this context, the studies for the determination of the Buffer Zone of Florence have been originated in 2007 within the project Il Centro storico di Firenze in trasformazione. Rilievo critico per la riqualificazione del paesaggio urbano (Cfr. Capitanio, 2015). The complex process of determination was structured starting from a study on the identification of the main lookout points located on the hilly slopes around the city. The area involved part of four municipalities’ territories: the Municipality of Florence, the Municipality of Sesto Fiorentino, the Municipality of Fiesole and the Municipality of Bagno a Ripoli.

These are panoramic points that have contributed to defining the perception of the urban area of Florence. The analysis of the visual axes and the depth plans allowed to perimeter a large urban and territorial area of high landscape value, whose transformations directly affect the perception of the center itself and the city skyline. The development of this project

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(Cfr. Capitanio, 2015). Il complesso processo di determinazione si è strutturato a partire da uno studio sull’individuazione dei principali punti di belvedere situati sui versanti collinari presenti attorno alla città. L’area ha coinvolto parte dei territori di quattro municipalità: il Comune di Firenze, il Comune di Sesto Fiorentino, Il Comune di Fiesole e il Comune di Bagno a Ripoli.

Si tratta di punti panoramici che hanno contribuito a definire la percezione dell’area urbana di Firenze. L’analisi degli assi visuali e dei piani di profondità hanno permesso di perimetrare un’ampia area urbana e territoriale di elevato valore paesaggistico, le cui trasformazioni incidono direttamente sulla percezione del centro stesso e sullo skyline della città. Lo sviluppo di tale progetto ha permesso di arrivare a definire i limiti della Buffer Zone che è stata approvata dal Comitato del Patrimonio Mondiale il 6 luglio 2015, in occasione della 39° sessione avvenuta a Bonn, con Decisione 39 COM 8B.441.

Non solo, l’inclusione dei punti di Belvedere all’interno delle “tutele” del Piano Strutturale della città ha rappresentato un significativo punto di contatto tra il lavoro svolto con la collaborazione dell’Università e la redazione degli strumenti urbanistici comunali sancendo un virtuoso sodalizio tra teoria e prassi (Cfr. Bini et al., 2015). È evidente che se lo stesso tipo di analisi, applicato così a grande scala sulla città di Firenze, fosse applicato alla città vecchia di

allowed to define the limits of the Buffer Zone which was approved by the World Heritage Committee on 6 July 2015, on the occasion of the 39th session in Bonn, with Decision 39 COM 8B.441.

Furthermore, the inclusion of Belvedere points within the “safeguards” of the city’s Structural Plan represented a significant point of contact between the work carried out with the collaboration of the University and the drafting of the municipal urban planning tools, sanctioning a virtuous partnership between theory and practice (Bini et al. 2015).

If the same type of analysis were applied extensively to the old city of Jerusalem, much of the new city and the high structures that surround it would be considered impacting from a landscape point of view. The protection of the landscape and the historical perception of the old city would conflict with the need to respond to housing demand. In a transformed context, it’s about the professional’s sensitivity that must find the right compromise between the design of new spaces and the occupation of the same, taking care not to overwhelm but to reconnect. This type of sensitivity, if applied in advance to the demographic explosion (began in the 1950s) would certainly have delocalized the luxurious residential skyscrapers with a view towards the old city, leaving space for a more gradual combination of housing.

In this way the new city would gradually organize itself in symbiosis with the pre-existence, just as it was happening in the 1930s

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Fig.2 panoramic view towards the façade of San Lorenzo and reworking visual axis and its prospective plans. (Aiello in Bini et al., 2016, p.137).

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Fig. 3 Data sharing project. View from Google of the GIS file of Piazza S. Lorenzo.

(Aiello in Bini et al., 2016, p.139).

Gerusalemme, senza tener conto dell’ultimo secolo di storia, gran parte della città nuova e delle alte strutture che la circondano sarebbero ritenuti impattanti da un punto di vista paesaggistico. La tutela del paesaggio e la percezione storica della città vecchia, entrerebbe in questo caso in conflitto con l’esigenza di rispondere alla domanda abitativa. Sta quindi alla sensibilità del professionista in un contesto ormai trasformato trovare il giusto compromesso tra la progettazione di nuovi spazi e l’ occupazione degli stessi, nella logica del non sopraffare ma del riallacciare. Una sensibilità di tale tipo, se applicata preventivamente all’esplosione demografica iniziata negli anni ‘50 avrebbe certamente delocalizzato i lussuosi grattacieli residenziali con vista verso la città vecchia, lasciando posto a un tessuto abitativo dal più graduale accostamento permettendo alla città nuova di organizzarsi progressivamente in

and 1940s in the Bauhaus district. The same concerns, as we mentioned above, can be read today in the 2019 State of conservation of the properties inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger on the historic center of Jerusalem. We remember in fact among the most striking critical issues “ascertained danger” for “severe destruction followed by a rapid urbanization”.

Structural axes and squares Focusing attention on Florence historical center, in the wake of the scientific collaborations between municipality and university, other interesting researches need to be mentioned, such as: Asse storico Porta San GalloPonte Vecchio- Porta Romana(2009 2010); il progetto Urban Critical Survey (2013-2014); Asse Ovest-Est: dalla via del contemporaneo alla via dei mercati nel centro storico di Firenze

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simbiosi con la preesistenza, proprio come stava accadendo nel quartiere Bauhaus a partire dagli anni ‘30 e ’40. La stessa preoccupazione come avevamo accennato, si legge oggi nel “State of conservation of the properties inscribed on the List of World Heritage in Danger del 2019” (WHC/19/43.COM/7A.Add.3) sul centro storico di Gerusalemme. Ricordiamo infatti tra le criticità più eclatanti i ‘danni accertati’ per ‘le gravi distruzioni seguite alla rapida urbanizzazione’.

Assi strutturali e piazze Focalizzando l’attenzione sul centro storico di Firenze, nel solco delle collaborazioni scientifiche tra municipalità e università si collocano altre interessanti ricerche quali: Asse storico Porta San Gallo- Ponte Vecchio- Porta Romana(2009 2010); il progetto Urban Critical Survey (2013-2014); Asse Ovest-Est: dalla via del contemporaneo alla via dei mercati nel centro storico di Firenze (2013-2014); Image_CITYlab (2014-2015) (Cfr. Bini et al. 2016).

Si tratta in questo caso di una serie strutturata di progetti molto specialistici, sviluppati nel corso di 7 anni che hanno analizzato puntualmente attraverso un analisi SWOT i numerosi agenti che hanno influenzato e che influenzano ancora oggi la trasformazione urbana della città. Volendo dare un quadro immediato del progetto possiamo dire che le ricerche imperniandosi sul concetto di spazio pubblico sono partite dall’analisi degli assi storici della città, il cardo e il decumano su cui ancora oggi si

(2013-2014); Image_CITYlab (2014-2015) (Bini, et al. 2016).

In this case, it is a structured series of very specialized projects developed over the course of 7 years, which punctually analyzed the numerous agents that influenced and still influence the urban transformation of the city through a SWOT analysis. Wanting to explain the project we can say that the research concerns the concept of public space, it starts analysing of the historical axes of the city, the Cardo and the Decumano on which still today a large part of the urban vitality is structured, and it points out the investigations into the historical squares and related urban landscape units located within the perimeter of the historic monumental center.

We highlight that for western culture the theme of the square has a history more than a thousand years old. From the Greek Agorà to the Roman Forum, these places have been structured over the centuries as representative elements of the culture that produced them. They do not represent a simple interruption in the urban network as an undeveloped space but instead the structural immateriality is the answer to the need of a right space to the function that lives there.

In this logic, the space becomes a ‘Place’, returning at the end the archaic meaning of a social condition linked to the office or function. The squares with their important prospects are in fact the fulcrum and proscenium of places of political power, religious power

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struttura gran parte della vitalità urbana, arrivando a puntualizzare le indagini sulle piazze storiche e sulle relative unità di paesaggio urbano dislocate all’interno del perimetro del centro storico monumentale.

Evidenziamo che per la cultura occidentale il tema della piazza ha una storia più che millenaria. Dalle Agorà greche ai Forum romani, tali luoghi si sono strutturati nei secoli come elementi rappresentativi della cultura che le ha prodotte. Esse non indicano una semplice pausa nella maglia urbana come spazio aedificato ma al contrario l’immaterialità strutturale è la risposta alla necessità di dare il giusto spazio alla funzione che lo abita. In tale logica lo spazio diventa ‘Luogo’ restituendo al termine l’accezione arcaica di una condizione sociale legata all’ufficio o alla funzione. Le piazze con i loro importanti prospetti, sono infatti fulcro e proscenio dei luoghi del potere politico, del potere religioso o di funzioni sociali comunitarie come la piazza del mercato.

Per le analisi è stata utilizzata una metodologia di rilievo critico teorizzata a partire dagli anni ’60 da Lynch nella scuola del Massachusetts Institute of Thechnology (Cfr. Lynch, 1960; Gordon Cullen, 1971; De Wolfe, 2013; Gosling, Foster, 1996) e implementata con sistemi di analisi critica volti al perseguimento dei più moderni obiettivi di tutela e valorizzazione. Analisi di tipo qualitativo e quantitativo si sono intrecciate con una metodologia di analisi della percezione urbana che attraverso gli elementi di forza e i sistemi di relazione ha

or community social functions such as the market square.

A critical methodology was used for the analysis. This methodology was theorized starting from the 1960s by Lynch in the MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Thechnology) school and implemented with critical analysis systems aimed at pursuing the most modern objectives of protection and enhancement. Qualitative and quantitative analysis were intertwined with an urban perception analysis methodology which, through the elements of strength and the relationship systems, clarified the structural hierarchies to be protected. Speaking about urban image and answering to the continuous requests for occupation of the public space (for the realization of temporary events, for the markets or by the traders themselves) this has also allowed to draw up a visual plan with the related guidelines for occupations temporary squares. Low visual impact areas have therefore been identified that allow the creation of temporary or semi-temporary installations that do not damage the image of the city.

Looking at the numerous squares in Florence, the in-depth study of each place history finally revealed the Genius Loci. This has permeated the vitality of the different squares, offering functional ways in respect with historical vocation of the place, protecting the diversity and wealth of expressions that qualify the complexity of the center.

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puntualizzato le gerarchie strutturali da tutelare. Parlando di immagine urbana e in risposta alle continue richieste di occupazione dello spazio pubblico (per la realizzazione di manifestazioni temporanee, per i mercati o da parte dei commercianti stessi) ciò ha inoltre permesso di stilare un piano visuale con le relative linee guida per le occupazioni temporanee delle piazze. Sono state quindi individuate delle aree a basso impatto visivo che permettono la realizzazione di installazioni temporanee o semi-temporanee che non danneggiano l’immagine della città.

Guardando alle numerose piazze di Firenze, lo studio approfondito del vissuto di ogni luogo ha infine rivelato il Genius Loci (Cfr. Norberg Schultz, 1992; Debuyst, 2001) che ha permeato la vitalità delle varie piazze giungendo a offrire degli indirizzi funzionali in linea con la vocazione storica del luogo tutelando in questo modo la diversità e la ricchezza di espressioni che qualificano la complessità del centro.

Conclusioni The Next Layer nell’Immagine urbana rappresenta esattamente ciò che il nostro secolo lascerà alle generazioni future. SPACE si configura in tale contesto come una piattaforma di sperimentazione e di confronto tra generazioni passate e generazioni future, accompagnando nella loro formazione gli architetti di domani.

Le due posizioni assunte dall’Italia e da Israele rappresentano i due naturali antipodi alla trattazione del tema. Rispettivamente:

Conclusions The Next Layer in the urban Image represents exactly what our century will leave for future generations. SPACE is configured in this context as a platform for experimentation and comparison between past generations and future generations, accompanying the architects of tomorrow in their training.

The two positions taken by Italy and Israel represent the two natural antipodes to the discussion of the topic. Respectively: On the one hand, the strong conservative action of a people that preserves a millenary tradition that has ferried it over the centuries and that has made it the custodian of material and immaterial cultural goods of exceptional universal value. A tradition that has preserved its image while adapting to changing needs; On the other hand, the vigorous enthusiasm of a people custodian of a thousand-year-old culture, that founded a new nation exactly in those lands where it had rooted its origins. A nation therefore that is re-establishing its image by making use of the multiple experiences gathered during the diaspora and which is aiming for a progressive image with a strong technological connotation.

Two distant and complementary positions.

The deep knowledge of an Italian architect of its territory, the pride of recognizing oneself in a tradition of excellence has meant that the design action has never been strayed from the reuse of classic themes in a modern key.

Even today the bibliography of an architecture

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• Da una parte la forte azione conservatrice di un popolo che preserva una tradizione millenaria che lo ha traghettato nei secoli rendendolo custode di beni culturali materiali e immateriali di eccezionale valore universale. Una tradizione che ha saputo preservare la propria immagine pur modificandosi e adattandosi al variare delle esigenze; • Dall’altra il vigoroso entusiasmo di un popolo, esso stesso custode di una cultura millenaria che ha fondato una nuova nazione esattamente in quelle terre in cui aveva radicato le proprie origini. Una Nazione quindi che sta rifondando la propria immagine facendosi forte delle molteplici esperienze raccolte durante la diaspora e che sta puntando ad un’immagine progressista dalla forte connotazione tecnologica.

Due posizioni tanto distanti quanto complementari. La profonda conoscenza che un architetto italiano ha del suo territorio, l’orgoglio del riconoscersi in quella tradizione ha fatto sì che l’azione progettuale non si sia mai disgiunta dal recuperare un particolare tema della propria tradizione per riproporlo in chiave moderna. Ancora oggi tra la bibliografia di uno studente di architettura non può mancare il De architectura vitruviano o il De re aedificatoria albertiano. Gli studi magistrali includono ben tre esami sulla storia dell’architettura, e gli ordini architettonici vengono ancora adottati per insegnare cosa significa ritmo e proporzione. In antitesi l’esperienza multinazionale di un architetto israeliano rappresenta un

student must include the Vitruvius’ De architectura or the Alberti’s’ De re aedificatoria ‘.

University studies include three exams in the history of architecture, and architectural orders are still used to teach what rhythm and proportion means. In contrast, the multinational experience of an Israeli architect represents a rich wealth of ideas that can certainly meet the need to affirm identity in the new nation. However, this attitude does not respond to the need to become reality in such a complex and highly stratified historical context as the old city of Jerusalem. Which is why it was easier to build the new city next to the old one. Not only! Determining the limits of buffer zones is a complex action already in those culturally homogeneous areas. Talking about limits In Israel it becomes a theme that ends up relentlessly to take on political connotations for those who want to delegitimize or justify particular actions.

In this project, Florence and Jerusalem, represent different faces of the same medal (Aiello in Luschi 2018. p.119). They both have made their own cultural background available, leaving aside any distinction of gender or belief, preserving their identity and openly talking about complex issues that orbit around the protection of the historical cultural heritage and on the contribution that our century will leave to future generations. The urban image of the city becomes the theme of confrontation, revealing mutual differences and at the same time mutual identities. This shows that

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bagaglio di idee infinito che certamente contribuisce a rispondere a quell’esigenza di affermare l’identità nella nuova Nazione. Tuttavia ciò non dialoga facilmente con un contesto storico così complesso e fortemente stratificato come la città vecchia di Gerusalemme. Ragione per cui è stato più facile costruire la città nuova affianco alla vecchia. Non solo! Determinare i limiti delle fasce di rispetto, azione di per sé complessa anche in ambiti culturalmente omogenei, diventa in Israele facile pietra di scandalo per chi cavalca tale argomentazione per delegittimare o giustificare azioni che finiscono inesorabilmente per assumere connotazioni politiche.

Ecco come Firenze da una parte e Gerusalemme dall’altra, facce diverse di una stessa medaglia (Aiello in Luschi 2018. p.119), lasciando da parte qualsiasi distinzione di genere o credo, hanno messo a disposizione ognuna il proprio bagaglio culturale, conservando la propria identità e dialogando apertamente sui complessi temi che orbitano attorno alla tutela del bene culturale storico in rapporto al contributo che il nostro secolo intende lasciare alle generazioni future. L’immagine urbana della città, diventa così banco di prova sul tema del confronto svelandoci le reciproche diversità e al tempo stesso le reciproche identità rendendo evidente che rispettare l’identità di tutti è sempre la chiave del dialogo fra i popoli e come tale un patrimonio da tutelare.

respecting everyone’s identity is always the key to a dialogue between peoples and for that it’s a heritage to be protected.

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Photo of San Lorenzo’s facade in Florence

by Sara Masi

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“lux veritatis, vita memoriae” | quando l’architettura parla “lux veritatis,vita memoriae” | when architecture speaks Marta Zerbini

Università degli Studi di Firenze PhD student at DIDA

Il seminario in progettazione architettonica ‘Space’ promosso dal Dipartimento di Architettura dell’Università di Firenze, dall’Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze e dalla facoltà di Architettura israeliana di Ariel, svolto negli anni 2018 e 2019 a Firenze e a Gerusalemme, ha proposto quattro interessanti occasioni di progetto. Per ogni anno di workshop sono stati presi ad esame due diversi siti, uno per ognuna delle due città, su cui impiantare i vari progetti degli studenti. Ma ad unire i singoli temi e le singole aree di progetto, all’interno di questo contesto seminariale, è stata una sorta di visione generale ad ampia scala che, come un unico filo rosso, li ha legati insieme. Questo ‘macro-tema’ riguarda non solo i quattro casi scelti come pretesto in un esercizio di pratica e di riflessione per gli studenti, né tantomeno riguarda le due città in sé. Si tratta bensì di andare ad indagare e questionare un approccio, una modalità, una forma di pensiero sul come considerare le nostre città e sul come progettarvi.

Confrontandosi con realtà diverse e spesso, come in questo caso, portatrici di un trascorso storico molto importante, emerge la necessità,

The architectural workshop ‘Space’ is promoted by the Department of Architecture of the University of Florence, the Academy of Fine Arts of Florence and the Israeli Faculty of Architecture of Ariel. Space is held in 2018 and 2019 both in Florence and in Jerusalem, proposing four interesting project opportunities.

Two different project’ sites are examined in each workshop year: one for each city. These sites identify some cities’ areas on which the student’s projects are located.

Within these two years of seminars, the topics and the sites of the four different projects have been tied together by a kind of bigger vision.

This ‘general issue’ or ‘big picture’ concerns not only the four project cases, that are chosen as a pretext of practice and reflection for students, nor does it concern the two cities themselves, Florence and Jerusalem. It is rather a matter of investigating and questioning an approach, a modus operandi, a way of think about how to consider our cities, and how to design in them.

The need -and the issue- to know how to interface with historical cities and how to lay the

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Archeological site of Pompeii. (Analogic photo by the author).

ed inevitabilmente la problematica, di come ci si possa interfacciare e secondo quali modalità porre le basi per un dialogo tra queste realtà e la nostra dimensione contemporanea.

Il workshop, che negli ultimi due anni con il nome di Space è stato il continuum culturale di un precedente esperimento italo-israeliano Solomon Project 2015-20171, ha messo in 1 Il workshop di progettazione Solomon Project è stato attivo dal 2015 al 2017 tra il Dipartimento di Architettura di Firenze (DIDA) e la facoltà di Architettura di Ariel University in Israele, precedendo il futuro workshop Space, aperto nel 2018 e attivo ancora ad oggi. Per ogni anno di

foundations for a dialogue between these cities and our contemporary dimension, emerges by the confrontation between two different realities with a very important historical past as Florence and Jerusalem.

The workshop Space 2018-2019 has been the cultural continuum of an earlier Italian-Israeli experiment named Solomon Project 2015-20171. Space has fielded a kind of 1 The architectural workshop Solomon Project has been held from 2015 to 2017 between the Dipartimento di Architettura di Firenze (DIDA) and the Israeli Faculty of

“lux veritatis, vita memoriae” - quando l’ architettura parla • marta zerbini

campo questo tipo di sfida, coinvolgendo i giovani studenti guidati dai professori delle diverse scuole a pensare alla città storica che vive nel nostro tempo, progettando in chiave contemporanea alcuni elementi architettonici incastonati da secoli nel tessuto urbano.

Questa sfida ha preso il nome di The next layer, con l’obiettivo di indagare ed approfondire proprio la domanda: qual è il prossimo livello per le nostre città? Quale visione e quale approccio progettuale contemporaneo è possibile attuare in una realtà storica, sapendola leggere, riconoscere e ponendosi in continuità con essa?

Ecco che i 4 casi studio scelti nel corso dei due anni di workshop si rivelano come occasioni di indagine ed esercizio per esplorare queste domande.

Il layer, in una metafora di stratificazione urbana, rappresenta una fase storica di cui si appropria la città. Il next layer ne rappresenta il livello di oggi, contemporaneo, in cui viviamo e che dovrebbe trovare una sua identità anche all’interno del luogo.

Il layer vive di una duplice natura, una fisica, intesa nella sua materialità e nella concretezza della costruzione, ed un’altra concettuale, appartenente ad un livello ontologicamente superiore, per questo inaccessibile, carico della storia, della memoria e della tradizione che racchiude in sé in ogni parte di città. workshop sono stati previsti due momenti di scambio con attività progettuale, uno con sede a Firenze e l’altro con sede a Gerusalemme. I progetti, frutto dei tre anni del workshop, sono andati in mostra alla Biennale di Architettura di Venezia nell’anno 2018 (Palazzo Mora, E.C.C., in Time Space Existence, Venice 2018, ISBN 978-90-826559-3-3).

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Querini Stampalia Foundation, Venice. Back façade.

Digital photo by the author.

challenge, involving young students guided by the teachers of the different schools to think about the historical city that lives in our time, designing in a contemporary key some architectural elements rooted for centuries in the urban fabric.

This challenge took the name of The next layer, to investigate and deepen the question: what is the next level for our cities? What vision and what contemporary design approach is possible in historical reality, standing in continuity with it?

Here are the 4 case studies chosen during the two years of workshops; they are opportunities

Architecture of Ariel University. Solomon Project has preceded the workshop. For each workshop year two different exchanged period have been previewd, one in Florence and one in Jerusalem. The project results of the three-yearworkshop have been exposed in the Biennale di Architettura di Venezia 2018 (Palazzo Mora, E.C.C., in Time Space Existence, Venice 2018, ISBN 978-90-826559-3-3).

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All’interno di questa visione appare chiaro come l’operazione di ricerca progettuale di Space si muova su più livelli. Mentre da un lato si indaga la fattibilità di una città in crescita e con questo tutti quegli elementi di analisi che giustificano e motivano un progetto architettonico, dall’altro se ne esplora proprio il senso più alto: come continuare a far vivere una città che rischia altrimenti di incombere nella possibilità di rimanere ancorata ad un’epoca che non può però più rispondere alla nostra?

Il seminario Space si presta ad essere un terreno di sperimentazione e uno strumento per riflettere su come far convivere la città contemporanea con quella antica. È interessante notare come in risposta a questo obiettivo le due squadre chiamate in campo, Italia e Israele, applichino approcci e metodologie operative opposte e talvolta in conflitto.

Non volendo però in questa sede commentare i risultati dei due approcci, spostiamo l’attenzione su quello che interessa veramente questa riflessione: il layer e cosa esso rappresenta.

Quando parliamo di ‘livello’ in una città storica, e come nel nostro caso ciò vale tanto per Firenze quanto per Gerusalemme, ci rifacciamo ad un concetto di stratificazione urbana e di classificazione delle fasi costruttive che vi vengono rintracciate. Talvolta si ricercano nel passato scavando al di sotto del livello visibile, ed in questo Gerusalemme ne è un caso esemplificativo, talvolta invece si riconoscono nei muri degli edifici tra le vie della città.

for investigation and exercise to explore these questions.

According to a met aphor of urban stratification, the layer represents a historical phase of which the city is appropriated. The next layer represents the level of today in which we live and which should find its identity within the city.

The urban layer has a double nature: a physical one, belonging to its materiality and to the concreteness of the construction, and a conceptual one, belonging to an ontologically superior level -and so inaccessible- full of history, memory, and tradition that every part of the city encloses.

We can notice that the research operation of Space moves on multiple levels. While on one hand we investigate the feasibility of a growing city, analyzing all those elements that justify an architectural project, on the other hand, we explore the highest sense of it: how can we continue to live in a city that risks remaining anchored to an era that can no longer respond to ours?

The workshop lends itself to be a field of experimentation and a tool to reflect on how to combine the contemporary city with the ancient one.

It is interesting to observe that answering to this aim the two teams, Italy and Israel, apply opposing approaches and methodologies, sometimes in conflict.

However, not wanting to comment on the results of the two approaches, we focus on what

“lux veritatis, vita memoriae” - quando l’ architettura parla • marta zerbini

Ciò che ci permette di apprezzare una struttura medievale rispetto piuttosto ad un palazzo rinascimentale nelle vicinanze, entrambi saldamente ricamati nel tessuto urbano, è esempio di come la stratificazione storica non solo sia di fatto una caratteristica fondante delle città ma diventa anche una chiave di lettura che gerarchicamente ci permette di evidenziare la composizione della stessa.

I livelli di una città quindi, rintracciati all’interno di una periodizzazione, si rivelano essere invarianti strutturali di una matrice urbana indelebile; o meglio, elidere questi livelli rappresenterebbe elidere la città stessa.

Il Cardo ed il Decumano sono un esempio di come certi tracciati siano a tutti gli effetti delle matrici fondanti del tessuto urbano tanto da condizionarne anche lo sviluppo successivo. Sono invarianti strutturali della città che non possono essere traditi se non distruggendo la città stessa, e, allo stesso tempo, diventano strumenti per leggerla e comprenderne le fasi storiche.

Le strade fondatrici del nucleo urbano sono alla base anche dell’espansione sia della città di Firenze che di Gerusalemme, e per questo ancora oggi riconoscibili e rintracciabili nelle loro planimetrie.

Ciò dimostra come i livelli urbani siano rintracciabili e rintracciati, poiché è possibile identificarli e delimitarli concretamente.

Il livello urbano infatti, per sua natura, è definito da un limite e rappresenta lui stesso un limite; sia fisico, dato dalla materialità della

interests this reflection: the layer and what it represents.

When we speak of ‘level’ in a historical city we refer to a concept of urban stratification and classification of construction phases that are traced in it. Sometimes these levels are searched in the past by digging below the visible level, and Jerusalem is an exemplary case of this kind of operation, or sometimes they are recognized in the buildings walls on the streets of the city.

What allows us to appreciate a medieval structure rather than a Renaissance palace nearby, both firmly rooted in the urban fabric, it’s an example of how the historical stratification is not only a founding characteristic of cities but it’s also a reading key that highlights the composition of the city itself.

The levels of a city are structural invariants of an indelible urban matrix; we may better say that the operation of deleting these levels would delete the city itself.

The Cardo and the Decumanus are an example of how certain traces are important founding matrices of the urban fabric so much to condition its subsequent development. They are structural invariants of the city and, at the same time, they become instruments for reading it and understanding its historical phases. The founding streets of urban core are also the basis of the expansion of both the city of Florence and Jerusalem, and for this reason they are still recognizable and traceable in their city maps.

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costruzione, sia concettuale, portando il peso della storia del suo tempo.

Difronte a due città ricche di storia e di un importante patrimonio culturale, osserviamo comunque due risposte molto diverse. Ad una Gerusalemme quasi accecata da una constate caccia alla datazione e contemporaneamente da un’accelerata edificazione dell’architettura contemporanea, si contrappone una Firenze che congela tutto il suo patrimonio allo stato in cui lo trova.

In questo spaccato culturale e di differente approccio metodologico, si inserisce Space e la collaborazione tra le varie università, col fine di trovare la strada per un livello nuovo, contemporaneo e soprattutto sostenibile nei confronti della città storica e di tutti i suoi livelli che l’hanno man mano costruita e traghettata fino al nostro.

E se questo è il portato che il concetto di layer urbano ha, lo analizziamo ora nella sua dimensione più concreta.

Guardando infatti al ruolo del livello urbano come chiave di lettura per studiare la città, ci accorgiamo presto che la sovrapposizione di ‘layer’ non avviene solo orizzontalmente, come può farci pensare una lettura stratigrafica muraria piuttosto che uno scavo, ma anche secondo una dimensione verticale, come in quelle opere che protraggono la loro costruzione nel tempo.

Una verticalizzazione di elementi che in architettura può essere fatta, rifatta o addirittura mai portata a termine.

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Photo of Pompeii’s Forum.

(Analog photo by the author).

This shows how urban levels can be tracked and traced, as they can be identified and delimited concretely.

In fact, the urban level is defined by a limit and it represents a limit itself; both physical, given by the materiality of the construction, and conceptual, carrying the weight of the history of its time.

Two cities with a rich history and cultural heritage show however two different behaviors. If Jerusalem is driven by an accelerated construction of contemporary architectures, Florence freezes all its heritage to the state in which it finds it. Space, and the collaboration

“lux veritatis, vita memoriae” - quando l’ architettura parla • marta zerbini

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Decumanus maximum of ancient Pompeii, also called ‘viale dell’abbondanza’.

(Analogic photo by the author).

E questo è il caso esemplificativo che riguarda la facciata della basilica fiorentina di San Lorenzo.

Tale opera architettonica, assieme al sagrato antistante, è un delle due aree di progetto dal tema ‘cultuale’ scelta per l’anno 2018 all’interno del seminario Space.

San Lorenzo e la assenza della facciata diviene un esempio tangibile e concreto di come l’architettura sia al tempo stesso layer e limite della storia della città. Volendo approfondire il concetto di limite in riferimento al layer, in una parentesi di più alto respiro, si ricorda

between the various universities, find its place in this cultural split, to discover the way to a new level: that should be contemporary and above all sustainable towards the historic city and all its levels that have gradually built it and conveyed it to our times.

This shows the conceptual side of the urban layer; let’s analyze it now in its most concrete dimension.

Thinking about the urban level as a key to read the city, we realize that the overlap of ‘layers’ does not happen only horizontally, as can let us think a stratigraphic wall reading rather

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che Le Corbusier teorizzava proprio su come l’architettura, per sua natura, fosse un limite, nella misura in cui materializzandosi divideva il vuoto da qualcosa che ne diventava ‘altro’.

L’architettura compiuta si appropria del vuoto e lo fa diventare un ‘non vuoto’, ed in questa operazione si fa limite. In un’accezione più concettuale del tema tutta l’architettura ha questa caratteristica intrinseca che si compie con il compiersi della costruzione, e nel nostro caso ciò è rappresentato proprio dal ‘non finito’. L’assenza di facciata si presta non solo a comprendere la definizione di livello urbano come fase storica di costruzione, ma anche come a questo corrisponda un limite, tracciato fisicamente dai muri. Il limite fisico dettato dal vuoto della non-facciata materializza un preciso layer storico della città di Firenze.

Per questa ragione Space, quando sceglie San Lorenzo come area di progetto, sta decidendo di indagare il next layer. Provando a proporre una nuova facciata per la basilica, come tassello di un puzzle o come livello contemporaneo per la città, si contribuisce, in quest’ottica, a concludere un’architettura che aspetta da sempre di essere finita.

Sebbene il tema possa sembrare a primo impatto un gesto provocatorio che mette in discussione un importante elemento storico per Firenze, nel momento in cui ci fermiamo a riflettere vediamo, in realtà, che questa sfida progettuale trova la sua giustificazione. Ciò perché viene posta in continuità non solo con la vita e la storia dell’opera

than archeological dig, but it happens also according to a vertical dimension, as in those architectural monuments that prolong their construction over time. A ‘verticalization’ of elements that in architecture can be done, redone, or even never completed.

And this is the case that concerns the facade of the Basilica of San Lorenzo in Florence.

This architectural work, with the churchyard in front of it, is one of the two project areas chosen for the year 2018 within the workshop Space.

San Lorenzo -and the absence of its façade- becomes a tangible example of how architecture is at the same a time layer and an edge of the city’s history. Deepening the concept of limit referring to the layer, we remember when Le Corbusier theorized on how architecture, by its nature, is a limit: materializing itself it divides the void from ‘something else’. The architecture appropriates the emptiness and makes it a ‘non-empty’, becoming in this operation a limit. All architecture has this inner characteristic, and in our case, this is represented by the ‘unfinished’ façade. The absence of a facade let us understand the definition of urban level as a historical phase of construction and how it represents a limit, physically traced by the walls.

The physical limit, dictated by the void of nonfaçade, materializes a precise historical layer of the city of Florence.

For this reason, choosing San Lorenzo as a project area means to investigate the next layer.

Space contributes to conclude an architecture

“lux veritatis, vita memoriae” - quando l’ architettura parla • marta zerbini

architettonica in sé, concepita per essere conclusa e mai terminata nonostante i concorsi indetti (1515-1516,1901-1905), ma è posta in continuità anche con il resto della città, se intesa come città vitale che accetta che l’identità del proprio tempo sia espressa nelle sue architetture.

Ecco quindi che si configura uno scenario in cui l’incompiutezza della facciata e il muro spoglio che la rappresenta si fanno portavoce di un mutismo urbano, paradossalmente, molto eloquente. È indubbio infatti come le architetture parlino e comunichino tra di loro in quanto parti di un sistema più ampio: le città. I fronti urbani si confrontano, instaurando un dialogo fatto da rapporti, altezze, proporzioni, che lo rendono talvolta paritario e talvolta gerarchico, ma sempre nel rispetto delle singole parti che compongono le città.

Rudolf Arnheim riesce con un bellissimo commento ad immortalare tutta la potenza comunicativa propria dell’architettura e lo fa evocando una serie di immagini famose a tutti, trovando il modo di mettere in contrasto le diversità del linguaggio dell’uomo con l’universalità del linguaggio dell’architettura. Citando Arnheim: Sebbene le ville di Palladio o il Palazzo Senatorio al Campidoglio ragionano con me in italiano and Louis Kahn’s Medical Research Buildings addresses me in English et la chapelle de Notre-Dame-du-Haut me parle en français de la colline de Ronchamp and die

that has always been waiting to be finished proposing a new façade for the basilica, as a piece of a puzzle or as a contemporary level for the city.

Although this proposal may seem provocative because it questions an important historical element for Florence, if we reflect, we see that this design challenge finds its justification.

This is possible because the operation of ‘completing’ San Lorenzo façade is placed in continuity both with life and history of the Basilica itself - conceived to be completed and never done despite the competitions held (15151516, 1901-1905) — and with the rest of the city, seen as a vital city accepting that the identity of its time is expressed in its architectures.

In this scenario, the incompleteness of the façade and its wall becomes the ‘spokesman’ of an urban mutism, paradoxically, very eloquent.

There is no doubt that architectures speak and communicate one each other as parts of a wider system: cities. The urban fronts confront themselves, establishing a dialogue made up by relationships, heights, proportions, which make sometimes an equal dialogue and sometimes a hierarchical one, but always respecting the individual parts that constitute the cities.

Rudolf Arnheim captures with a beautiful sentence all the power of communication of Architecture. He does it evoking a series of famous architectural images, comparing the diversities of human languages with the universality of the language of architecture. To quote Arnheim:

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Focus of a column in the Forum of Pompeii: Corinthian capital and its entablature.

(Analogic photo by the author).

Bauhaus Gebäude reden mit mir deutsch, they all say the same: the great buildings soothe my mind with their order2(Arnheim, 1994, p. 6).

La capacità dell’architettura di ‘alleviare la mente’, di calmare, di comunicare una determinata sensazione al visitatore è possibile e reale, ed avviene al di là di tutte le possibili differenze tipologiche o ideologiche: avviene perché l’architettura ha un suo linguaggio 2 Rudolf Arnheim per Domus dicembre 1994, Domus N°776, dicembre, Aforisma, pag. 6.

Traduzione: “Sebbene le ville del Palladio o il Palazzo Senatorio al Campidoglio ragionano con me in italiano e il Medical Research Building di Louis Kahn mi si rivolge in inglese e la Cappella di Notre-Dame-du-Haut mi parla in francese dall’alto della collina di Ronchamp e gli edifici del Bauhaus discutono con me in tedesco, tutti dicono la stessa cosa: i grandi edifici placano la mia mente con il loro ordine”.

Sebbene le ville di Palladio o il Palazzo Senatorio al Campidoglio ragionano con me in italiano and Louis Kahn’s Medical Research Buildings addresses me in English et la chapelle de Notre-Dame-du-Haut me parle en français de la colline de Ronchamp and die Bauhaus Gebäude reden mit mir deutsch, they all say the same: the great buildings soothe my mind with their order2(Arnheim, 1994, p. 6).

Rudolf Arnheim for Domus december 1994, Domus N°776, december, Aphorism, pag. 6.

“Although Palladio’s villas or the Palazzo Senatorio on the Campidoglio reason with me in Italian and Louis Kahn’s Medical Research Building addresses me in English and the Chapel of Notre-Dame-du-Haut speaks to me in French from the top of the hill at Ronchamp and the Bauhaus buildings talk to me in German, they all say the same: the great buildings soothe my mind with their order”.

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Focus of the Nordic Pavilion, Biennale Gardens in Venice.

(Analogic photo by the author).

universalmente riconoscibile (“.their order”) ed è possibile ascoltarla. È evidente quindi che ogni architettura, costruita per determinate ragioni e in determinati periodi, porti in sé un significato espresso attraverso un preciso e proprio linguaggio architettonico. La città latina ad esempio, fondata su cardo e decumano, è da sempre stata un sistema relazionato tra parti con ruoli specifici, e proprio la specificità del ruolo che ricoprivano, le connotava di vesti diverse.

La basilica di San Lorenzo dialoga con il sagrato e con gli edifici adiacenti, e su questo sistema di equilibri anche il resto della città, appartenente a periodi, o layer, diversi e successivi, si inserisce e si costruisce, obbligando persino Palazzo Medici Riccardi, il cui prospetto frontale

The power of architecture to ‘relieve the mind’ or to communicate a certain sensation to the visitor is real, and it takes place beyond any typological or ideological differences: it’s possible because architecture has its own universally recognizable language (“…their order”), it speaks that language and we can listen to it.

It is therefore evident that every architecture has its own meaning expressed through a specific architectural language, explaining also the reasons why they have been built and in certain period. The Latin city for example, founded on Cardo and Decumanus, has always been considered as a system related between parties with specific roles, and those roles give them a different ‘aspect’.

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aggetta sulla ora principale via Cavour, a connotare di importanza anche quello laterale e tergale, perché rivolti verso la basilica.

Si può argomentare quindi sul potere espressivo e comunicativo dell’architettura, su come essa, se letta attentamente, parli, e su come un muro, con le sue proporzioni, la materialità, la sezione, le aperture o l’assenza di tali, sia in gradi di trasformare il messaggio che trasmette tanto da cambiarne la sensazione a chi lo abita.

Ecco che, in quest’ottica, risulta prioritario ri-iniziare a leggere, o ascoltare, le architetture per capirle a pieno. Su questa linea di pensiero appare necessario portare a termine un’opera, anche secoli dopo, per completezza del suo messaggio e dell’architettura che essa rappresenta, con la consapevolezza che abitare la città del nostro tempo implichi necessariamente farla vivere e crescere.

Saper ascoltare cosa comunica la città ed operare per la vitalità della stessa è forse un’operazione tanto difficile quanto dimenticata, ma se ricordiamo bene Paul Valery, nel suo scritto l’Eupalino, ci ricorda come tra la maggior parte degli edifici muti, solo alcune architetture in realtà parlino, ed ancor meno cantino. Si tratta infatti di un’operazione probabilmente ambiziosa e complessa, ma ciò non scoraggia dal tendere in questa direzione, tenendo fermamente solida l’idea che si opera all’interno di un sistema più grande di noi, quale la città rispetto ai suoi edifici.

Alla luce delle considerazioni fatte, ci chiediamo se forse il next layer che si cerca di indagare

The basilica of San Lorenzo dialogues with the churchyard and the adjacent buildings.

On this system of balances, the rest of the city that belong to different periods or layers, fits and builds itself. Medici Riccardi Palace, for example, connote of importance also the side and back façades, because they face towards the Basilica.

We can speak about the expressive and communicative power of Architecture and how architecture, if read carefully, speaks. We can notice how a wall can transform its message and the feeling it causes, just changing its proportions, materiality, section, openings or the absence of such.

In this perspective, the priority is to ‘re-read’ or listen to the architectures to understand them fully. It seems necessary to complete a building, even centuries later, for the completeness of its message and of the architecture it represents, knowing that living in the city in our time necessarily implies making it grow and keeping it alive.

Listening to what the city communicates and working for its vitality is perhaps as difficult as forgotten, but if we well remember Paul Valery, in his book ‘L’Eupalino’, reminds us how among most of the silent buildings, only some architectures speak and even less sing.

This is probably an ambitious and complex operation, but it does not discourage us from moving on this direction, knowing that we operate in a system bigger than ourselves, such as the city compared to its buildings.

“lux veritatis, vita memoriae” - quando l’ architettura parla • marta zerbini

attraverso il workshop, al di là delle differenze di approccio, dei metodi e dei risultati stessi, non sia proprio il recuperare il linguaggio dell’architettura, ascoltarlo, ri-conoscerlo e capirlo.

Un ascolto della città che se da un lato implica la consapevolezza del fatto che le architetture parlano, dall’altro è posto alla base della conoscenza necessaria per pensare di costruirvi il nuovo.

Riuscire a fare questo rappresenta la prima base solida per mettersi nella giusta direzione di rispetto e di comprensione dell’identità del luogo, su cui poi poter progettare in chiave contemporanea, coltivandone la memoria in maniera attiva. La storia, la memoria e la tradizione diventano una conditio sine qua non per il progetto di nuove architetture che, secondo quanto detto, devono assumere un rapporto di dialogo con quelle precedenti. Cicerone dichiara proprio la dimensione attiva e viva che assume la storia e la memoria nel tempo, ed è secondo questa filosofia di pensiero che si può pensare ad una progettazione rispettosa ma autentica3. Questo non significa quindi contemplare la storia senza interazione, ma al contrario, si intende far vivere la città, come è sempre stato, in ogni suo tempo, con l’ambizione ed il dovere, da architetti, di ascoltare e far cantare la nostra architettura.

Beyond any differences of approach, methods, and results themselves, we wonder if perhaps the ‘next layer’ that we investigate through the workshop could be just the recovery of the language of architecture, to being able to listen to it, identify it and understand it. Listening to the city is placed at the base of the necessary knowledge to think about building the ‘new’.

Doing this represents the first step towards the direction of respect and understanding of a place identity, on which then could design in a contemporary key, cultivating its memory in an active way.

History, memory, and tradition become a conditio sine qua non for the design of new architectures that must assume a relationship of dialogue with the previous ones. Cicero declares precisely the active and living dimension that takes on history and memory in time.

According to this philosophy of thought it’s possible think about a respectful but authentic design3. This does not mean contemplating history without interaction, but on the opposite, we intend to make live the city, as it has always been in all its time, with the ambition and the duty, as architects, to listen and make our architecture sing.

3 Cicerone. 1955, De Oratore, II, 9, 36, “Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis”, traduzione “La storia in verità è testimone dei tempi, luce della verità, vita della memoria, maestra di vita, messaggera dell’antichità”. Da qui il titolo, tradotto: “(La storia è) luce della verità, vita della memoria”.

3 Cicerone. 1955, De Oratore, II, 9, 36, “Historia vero testis temporum, lux veritatis, vita memoriae, magistra vitae, nuntia vetustatis”, translation “History is the witness of time, the light of truth, the life of memory, the directress of life, the herald of antiquity”. This title’s paper translation: “(History is) the light of truth, the life of memory”.

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biennale di venezia 2018 | solomon project

S.P.A.C.E. Project È il continuum del Solomon Project, precedente esperimento culturale iniziato nel 2015 dalla collaborazione con Ariel University di Israele. Trova il suo sviluppo in ambito progettuale e di analisi nelle due diverse ma affini realtà, quella italiana e quella israeliana.

Solomon Project ha partecipato alla Biennale di Venezia 2018 nell’esposizione Time Space Existence a Palazzo Mora, il cui tema riguardava concetti assoluti di Tempo, Spazio ed Esistenza.

S.P.A.C.E. Project Is the continuum of the cultural experiment Solomon Project, which started in 2015 in partnership with Ariel University of Israel.

It develops in the projectual and analysing sphere in the different but similar realities, the Italian and Israeli one.

Solomon Project took part in the Venice Biennale 2018 at the Time Space Existence exhibition in Palazzo Mora, whose theme consisted in absolute concepts of Time, Space and Existence.

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Ariel University – School of Architecture & DIDA Italy Solomon Project – Interdisciplinary Seminar in Architectural Planning Between Florence and Jerusalem Solomon Project is the result of a continues dialog between two schools of architecture. This project consists of an international exchange between Italian and Israeli students that alternately meets in each country for a period of ten days, during which they work on two different architectural projects: one in Florence, and one in Jerusalem.

Both schools represent two polar cultures. One is rooted in European history, while the second represents on the one hand an innovative tendency of a young Nation to express the dynamic innovation of their world, but on the other hand, derives from an ancient culture that grew on the land of Abraham and Jesus. The teaching staff is composed of leading professors of each institute, specializing in different aspects of architectural planning and research. Therefore, the seminar structure allows students to get in touch with different cultures, planning methods, approaches and built environments. The students work together in mix groups, giving their contribution to the projects - a contribution based on personal experience and planning method of their origin university.

Contextual Architecture in an Era of Globalization In an age of universal architecture that tends to operate like product design, the seminar is based on parametric architectural study that aimes to extract the particular spirit of place of each site,

biennale di venezia 2018. solomon project

and thus, to assist and prove the feasibility of maintaining a chain of architectural development endemic to a specific place. The seminar deals with the character, identity, form and function of the built urban space, in search of the memory of the place and its genius loci. The project, therefore, asks to apply on the different sites the same functional program suggested by the students.

The constant comparison encourages the students to grow a new creativity, flexibility, awareness, and self-confidence. Notably, the experience developed in small time eases and forces a superior and more profitable approach to two cultures that have many points of touch but also many differences. All these factors contribute to creating a fertile terrain for the professional and personal growth of the students.

In the last three years we investigated different issues and aspects of architectural planning linked to Florence and Jerusalem: City Walls (2015), Urban Piazza (2016), Architecture and Water (2017). The results are over 20 fascinating architectural projects. The encounter has also produced shared publications by professors from the two institutes on themes and issues presented during the seminars, as well as exhibitions that were held in Israel and Italy showing student’s projects and cultural activities.

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Teaching team Ariel University – School of Architecture: Yoram Ginzburg (Project Manager), David Cassuto, Gilad Duvshani, Itzik Elhadif, Yair Varon (scientific coordinator) Università degli Studi di Firenze – DIDA: Cecilia Maria Roberta Luschi (Project Manager), Fabio Fabbrizzi, Andrea Ricci, Laura Aiello (scientific coordinator) University of Rome Tor Vergata - DICII: Francesco Taormina Academia delle Belle Arti: Claudio Rocca

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Finito di stampare da Officine Grafiche Francesco Giannini & Figli s.p.a. | Napoli per conto di didapress Dipartimento di Architettura Università degli Studi di Firenze Settembre 2021

The relationship with history, between contemporary architecture and the historical sites, is the narrative thread of the different themes faced by the various authors assuming a broader visual prospective determined by the heterogeneous points of view by which the central theme is developed.

Therefore, the book becomes a discussion through articles between Italy and Israel, an exchange and comparison between two different realities with the same process of architectural and historical preservation: a reference for some, an advice for others. As it deals with some still “hanging” themes some nerves are confronted, uncovered by approaches with differences and some affinities, as the Italian and the Israeli ones, where architecture and history are the nucleus in which (around which) the dialogue between these two cultural realities develops. A common reflection and not a mutual judgment.

Cecilia Maria Roberta Luschi Accomplished her Humanistic Studies she graduated and took a PhD in Architecture at the University of Florence. She’s Researcher of Draw and Architectural Survey at the DIDA Department of University of Florence and she’s specialized in Architecture and Arts for Liturgy at the Pontifical University of St. Anselmo in Urbe – Rome. Since the 2015 she’s the head of the SOLOMON/SPACE project in partnership with Ariel University and from 2020 she’s the head of the Ashkelon mission for the MAECI in partnership with AAC. Yair Varon Graduate in Architecture from the Politecnico of Milan.

M.A. degree in Cultural Heritage Planning and Management at Bar Ilan University.

Currently Ph.D. student at Bar Ilan University, field of research: Defence Heritage.

Teaches Architectural Planning and Built Heritage Conservation at Ariel University School of Architecture. Member of ICOMOS Israel and ICOMOS scientific committee ICOFORT.In 2007 he won the First Prize in a competition for museum planning at archaeological sites, the Prix de Roma International Planning Competition in Italy.

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