Network Trials

Abstract

A research carried out within the Department of Architectural Design of the University of Florence offers the opportunity to examine, thanks to the design practice exercised on a case study, some theoretical assumptions about the city matured by a part of architectural culture since the second half of last century and perhaps still poorly explored. At the basis of these theories, the break of disciplinary autonomy in the conception of public space is clear: architecture opens up to content from other disciplines in an attempt to recover the identity of places and that sense of appropriation of collective space by citizens. The disciplinary heteronomy is a difficult road but however it seems to be necessary in the attempt to resolve the conflicts inherent in the contemporary city plagued by increasingly marked separations. Limits, separations and degradation are phenomena that are often self-feeding and which space, if not the public one, could be the bearer of those values and solutions able to subvert the state of things?