The Second History of the Urban Project Another modern tradition Decomposing European cities produced in the past

forty years, has launched a range of serious guilt about urban ideology derived from the functional architecture. Critics like Bernard Huet and Leon Krier, concentrated in the Athens Charter and its followers the most serious charges to civility. Previously, Gordon Cullen and townscape in the sixties, and academia morfotipolgica in the seventies, emphasized appreciation for diverse compact city, and the interlocking between streets and buildings. Many other commentators have joined the bandwagon of course detractors sometimes more opportunism that reason, and so are widespread whipping banally zoning, urban policy and the management plans, to pretend to cross off wrong or negative any element of reason in the layout of cities. It is not the purpose of this analysis do functional urban defense: quite the contrary. But keep trying to make him the scapegoat to justify other whims, no, I think, no interest, and I would not be confused between operators such Manichaeism. Neither the Byzantine confrontation between "general" and "specific" or political-economic discussion between "regulatory" and "deregulatory". I am interested in reviewing the origins of the current theoretical vacuum, precisely to support the new practices. Watching conceptual breakthrough that functionalism meant for urbanism, with eyes more current and more practical than those who only have taken it as an excuse. The principles of the functional city, started in Germany in the 20s, were based on the will to order the cities on the criteria of role specialization, the importance of road traffic, and the opening of closed spaces hygienist, both in buildings and on public roads. Vista today, among the many judgments that may suggest, the most surprising was his illusion that doctrine in the complete eradication of the former towns and the construction of an urban setting ex-novo for all civilization. In proposals that would have the greatest impact, the radical denial of any historical value to the city was to couple the ingenuity with which they hoped to build their own slogans cities "of the future." Fortunately, this was not the only way in which modern architecture was changing cities. Since a few years, a new figuration had already entered the urban landscape through the work of the innovators of Expressionism and "Sezzession". Proposals for modern architecture-linked with advanced social projects in municipalities Dutch socialist or new uses collective-Central Europe or Scandinavia had already noted changes in the urban fabric, some potentialists, according to the principles of a new culture. In Holland, the work of Dudock and Oud,-much as the most classic of De Klerk orBerlage, denotes a style Urban Project and the situation as meddling novel that breaks with the established context. The work of De Finetti, Lancia or own Muzio in Milan, the Fisher or Bentsen Petersen in Copenhagen, and Markelius Saarinen in

Helsinki, Ljubljana Pleznic those, such as Folguera in Cataluna, or Zuazo in Madrid, the city handled the new architecture field without ever losing its reference this as a tool for urban planning. Discipline wise, it is truth, love and not hate the existing city, and therefore seeks its transformation more rigorous. That was an urbanism that enjoyed the different condition of each urban part, with the understanding of the big city as complex artifact, but always rich and diversified. I think it is there, in that complexity, where you have to recognize the true tradition of modern, unmitigated or quotes. Quite the opposite of the schemes they will defend functionalism, culture of the big city, born in the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, and exuberant in large metropolitan capital XX, never wanted to shorten its complications simplifying their problems. The notion of modern metropolis never resort to reduced schematic principle of its design. On the contrary, the power of the urbanist metropolis idea has been the progressive incorporation of cultural themes and issues in the city, which are progressively taking a naturalization and enrich the discussion of it. It is also the son of the complexity and overlap, as the "Project-Urban" is born and is becoming the most appropriate time to draft, rich, varied and able to proyecccion modern city. Urban Project object for the big city are already in the 20s, three or four major issues. One of them, perhaps most important, was the project of residential neighborhoods. Taking housing as material no quintessential urban, the neighborhood became the catalyst for growth in the new scale, in Italy with INA house groups and other populist experiences in Northern Europe and the Centre albeit with very different characteristics. Neighborhood projects were starting a test with the ideas of city, that wanted to put into practice a monitored suppressed form and more subtle than direct theoretical discussion. Another source of urban projects, was based on the formulation in updated form of the classic themes of the architecture civil, now posed as architecture, urban center. They were the Scandinavian countries tested,-before others, attempting to project a modern urban center for some of their cities. The work of Pedersen and Berner in Norway, or Fisher, Petersen and Bentsen in Denmark, are exemplary in this regard. With civil architecture and monuments, the city center was configured as outstanding specific project. Parallel to these new issues, also traces of streets, as a way of sort of mid-sized urban areas, continued as an established procedure to deal with urban formfortables from scales, with a theme and perfectly dominated interdisciplinary knowledge. Its further development was produced in England, Belgium, France, and generally throughout the area of the garden city movement. Recognizing these issues as design issues involved identifying parts of the metropolis as projects in themselves, and also, not to be confused or repetition. We sought to moderate the technical requirements of large infrastructure with attention to monumental and landscape value of the public works worked, finally, for an idea of intervention is not architecture or plan, but Urban Project.

Urban Project is based on the geography of the city because of their requests and suggestions, and introduce the architecture language elements that shape the place. Urban Project is relying more on the complexity of the work to be done, that in simplifying rational urban structure. It is also working inductively, generalizing the particular, the strategic, local, generative and model. Sometimes these projects were joining laterally with a comprehensive plan logic, as in the work of Berlage or Unwin, but in most cases, rather than the horizontal coherence in a joint program is the intensity with which the episodes roads or architectural urban express condition that gives them a master role in the big city. It is already there, since the beginning of the century until the thirties, a vast urban project culture that has much in common with the ideas that today more committed oriented urbanism. Have something like these efforts to overcome the current slump of almost fifty years that a gradual withdrawal of the condition of the urban project, finished paranoia sometimes in professional and public incompetence. It seems, therefore, of interest in that tradition scrutinizes usable history of characters and moments, perhaps less publicized, that have made substantive contributions or even unorthodox modern idea of Urban Design. Unorthodox, at least regarding the historiography that taking CIAM history as history of Modern Architecture, breaks from any reference to the year 30 urban project. And in doing so, has confused some of the most significant passages in the construction of the contemporary city and obscured the contradictions that implies cultural progress. The rupture of the year 30 Because something happened in Brussels, after that CIAM congress and 1929 when Victor Bourgeois, the great Belgian city planner, had introduced himself as president of the act work on residential districts developed by the various national commissions. The Belgians had brought the beautiful plants and Kapelleveld Cit Moderne, drawn by Louis van der Swaelmen still associate certain studies. The title of the conference was on "forms built ground-forms", whose theme now (we have not stopped claiming for some time and that, fortunately, start finding some echoes) would be so interesting today as then. Congress developed the shape of the city at their neighborhoods and districts. Congress followed the 1929 Frankfurt on existentialism, which had focused on the housing ladder. Conestos two conferences on housing and neighborhood, respectively, was preparing to jump to the next two had to devote to city in the whole of Moscow (later Athens, 1933), and the urban region (Paris, 1935). It was that leap between the two scales which showed, with the break that occurred between groups and individuals, also breaking methodology in projecting city. The broad theoretical gap between the building's architecture and urbanism, which should have been covered vacuum with progress in projecting this intermediate scale hitherto had produced many results, covered very ideology instead. The intellectual and organizational brilliance of Le Corbusier

and Gropius programmatic tensions and postures Giedion to image advertising, cornered the defenders of Urban Design as intermediate field of discussion and work and caused the leak in the assembly toward ideological issues of "functional city" and "The Athens Charter". The project of the city and sublimated in the discussion of great principles, almost philosophical, political and sociological, that summarizes the Athens Charter. And the proposed urban form resulting overlap method adopted as any urban specificity of a deductive process from the general rules (the diagram of Chandigarh, Hilbersheimer repetitive orders), or direct expansion of modern building macroscopic (Obus Project). That's when the serious dichotomy materialized why, as he settled the discussion of the city to the level of general principles, architecture switched off the city, always taking refuge in the excuse of not complying with those principles. The great alibi was invented and opened the gap between urban planning and architecture that still remains to seal. Significant piece of those episodes: the general secretary of the CIAM would go to the front Giedion and Giedion - Le Corbusier, seized power in Dutch and Peripherals sweeping and leaving Van Esteren commitment as president. The Urban Project, as intermediate labor camp where the scales are intertwined and where the architect is reasonable authority in the form of the city precisely because it started Architectural Building, was then overwhelmed by the official art and distracted from the usual commentary advertisements. But would find locally successful development in the work of many independent designers in various European and American cities. The modern urban project. Van Eesteren, Martin and UR Quaroni are teachers who bring examples of modern tradition of Urban Design. In different positions, theoretical and circumstantial force teach attention to urban form dimensions explored projectiles own and unconventional. Fully organic CIAM (was its president from 1930 to 1939), although the fraction aligned loser, Van Eesteren spread that vision body material distrusted urban utopia propagandist Le Corbusier and symbolism, as if his mystification guess the idealization could result. Rationalist on principle, without concessions, Leslie Martin teaches wealth of nuances that half a tradition as strong as the British urban collects the message modeled modern and their cultural and social. Quaroni, however, from the roots of Mediterranean classicism, brand experience a culture in which the city and architecture, inseparable, ranging in a continual battle to clarify conceptual discipline their own instruments and rules of its projection, with internal anguish a duvet could never understand. The city project goes through these three teachers as a constant reference, and their jobs, even in different dimensional terrain, always offer true urban scale today makes us see them as individuals in the projection of the cities.

Neither the best planners of today (and I use the word planner to full consciousness) are now, thankfully, planners descendants of the Athens Charter, nor the architects wanted to appear against controversial. The urban project today largely maintained by the city that taste as varied geography and the love for their parties since the beginning of the century have survived to breakage. It also maintains and materials issues, methods and tools, rejuvenated. Drawn attention to the road as a means of execution, the proposed new building tissues and reinterpretation of urban places are perhaps three of the major issues that with innovative solutions and approaches, matching many of the most interesting urban projects. Five points define them as Urban Projects: - Territorial effects beyond its area of operation; - Complex and interdependent nature of its contents, overcoming monofunctionality (park, track, type, etc.), Mix of uses, users, temporal rhythms and visual guidance; - Intermediate scale, which could be fully implemented within a period of a few years; - Load proactive to city architecture, independent of the architecture of the buildings; - Component important public investment and collective uses of the program. It's an idea, so to speak, a street caters to their corners than his own path. We are far from the neoclassical conception as repetition street front elevations equalized sorted. As far as pure circulatory street. Lancia recall instead for placing in corners of modern towers Milan to articulate, in the added complexity of the corner, the full understanding of the streets in her match, and even the urban fabric together. We are very interested in this project precisely because modernity as road layout, could overcome the rigidities of alignments drawn from a position well aware of the values. Alignment as a defense of the relationship-building plot here at all is not denied, but updated for a proposal widely useful, rigorous and realistic. It is clear that the issue of the track is one of the most strongly present in the contemporary discussion and provokes many responses most advanced current townplanning. Because the roads relations with urban form are now at least as strong as ever, and certainly much more than ever. The minimalism of Collov recognizes this fact in an alternative way, very complementary, which is Guillermo Vazquez in his project to treat Monterusciello motorway, the new district emerged after the destruction of the earthquake in Pozzuoli, Naples, and that is difficult union in the architecture of the nodes road, seeking to turn the structure of the highway in an architectural construction: a building for its size and complexity is susceptible of a formal composition as expressive aesthetic rules and justifying themselves. This part, therefore, beyond the vision pure monofunctional topographical road, its simple logic engineering, circulatory and understand their place in the buildings as fact edificatorio more, with its great importance as a visual reference and constant observation. The three-dimensional assessment of road (walls, embankments, crossing-free, porches and ramps) acquires a priority interest. Vzquez Consuegra

proposed-in a way I believe clairvoyant-syntactic variety of situations that are set in a spacious flat contact road (highway) with the ground, and steps through. Your project is paradigmatic in recognition of his subject and I think it may exemplify a modern statement of equivalent solutions manualistics traditional road. His answer to the problem of Monterusciello, is nothing to do with the highway fully formalized an artifact. You can not stop this goal recognized that click on one of the hardest bones of urban planning is needed today. Le Corbusier, the Smithsons, Tange, tried to architecture with walkways. We trust over Vazquez approach, not only because it's 50 years later and, therefore, incorporates lessons and failures of teachers, but it also moves the problem to an intermediate, more useful to change practices in flawed poor construction of roads, safer and likely effects of the project, less theoretical than the large dimension in which teachers moved. Urbanism is the design of streets and buildings is an obvious statement if you think about the old, and instead seems problematic at the present time. However, the very nature of the fact that urban is as physical fact, today even more than before, for the simple building-street interdependence, based on the richness, variety and difficulty of the urban project. Joan Busquets in the same area for Monterusciello (always among the proposals for "La Citta immaginate" responsible for the Triennale of Milan, 1987), the importance given to the road sections and road-house units, could indicate a willingness neoclassical repetitive order. The strength of this project is rigorously street to the big avenues, as typological real axis, organizing entire building sector units precisely through the streets. The remarkable thing about this project is the greater autonomy that together these various strands keep road-ready as a disorder typological voluntary Is that possible? Is this an order of fragmentation? Do not forget that the consultation concerned the restructuring of a large estate, still under construction, but invertebrate, and that responses to the same diagnosis inevitably involved intentional about what exists. Busquets, unlike Vazquez Consuegra, ignores the highway and is interested precisely intermediate paths for that road as organizer of buildings in packages or separate axes, leaving the territory, with its powerful forms, the only unifying factor settlements. It is a proposal for dissection of the modern city, in mechanical parts scattered on the ground, without much concern for the conflict of circulatory axes, home orders, or dead spaces, but finding ways to articulate a "walk-houses to flush variable "" Highway-street children "," neighborhood-access frontage road ", etc.. The research, part road, part of typological organization, opens new questions on how to build the city's neighborhoods and major contemporary massive infrastructural systems have dramatically shown. And Busquets collected as urban design issues that he wants to have as valid and proper. The dramatic at times, and now perhaps interesting, breaks ground between land and roads; tangencies and penetrations between building guidelines and geometries of railways, highways or links, the contradictory topography from the large plazas, open spaces and sports and great public buildings

or half empty, and ultimately, the delusions regarding the mapping section in the city that today is, are their battlefield. Perhaps angry because today's cities, where coups and grow quickly, have lost respect for the land, and then it comes, without mercy, the rate of contempt. The tissues The corbuseriano anathema against street-runner has not died. Fifty years after that outburst, the architects which will continue to look for the good relationship between streets and houses, homeless identity since the Renaissance dress had served us comfortably. Still Siola and Siza, in its proposals for Naples, no doubt the effectiveness of road alignment as trace (de Sol Morales 2007)edition: with very different intentions, certainly, but with the same ease in getting through houses forming streets. The draft Siola cares especially for the development of typological order to develop varied with the large area to the east of the historic center, which would be available after the transfer of the railway and the central station. Along the center directional projected pro Tange, and encourage direct and controversial alternative, the new frame is composed of blocks, rectangular and square, sized me-days, with perhaps excessive reliance on repetition as under continuous urban forms. The central green axis force is not just rhetoric in a city like Naples, where the magnitude of the urban agglomeration obviously no warrants as to its scale composition. Maybe since the seventeenth century and the viceroyalty, no town planning has sought, until the dramatic tangenziale of the past decade, establishing forms of urban order reference for a general. In this sense, Beaux-Arts formalism is here thankfully unfashionable, efficient and economical, but without the stimulus of those grains of irony that would add to the mixture prepared tasty dressing. Actually this is a discussion about the city fabric. Regularity and typology are the stakes that grips the project, linked together in a monolithic manner. The greatest interest is provided by the morphological subsystem articulation present among themselves how the different fragments interfere frame, and how urban few general guidelines result in ruptures of order. This will happen to Alvaro Siza, because he starts precisely at this scale, to give an order to the paths of urban place. Siza also projects the final analysis, only blocks and streets. But Siza little concerned about the rigor of apples, nothing matters typology - blessed be! - But shape the outer-space form his small port specifically urban layout with a simple and secure urbanization. Create a port as a regular venue: 350 meters front is a confidence scale for that space. The contrast with the sea is enhanced not by a panoramic view, but by the vertical force of the facades on the water, by the contact of the solid and liquid. The pieces are -50 meters-conventional dimension and coordination with the city is the historical sequence that starts in Piazza Mercato.

With strange simplicity, Siza built especially apparent solutions based on trivial but evilly intentioned. In the end, all the urban elements are summarized in the project without drama, with ease: the port, the shaft of the square perimeter circulation through the blocks, which borders the park ... More difficult would this simplicity create completely new urban spaces, away from the existing city, where only the geography, perhaps, but not the story, give our limping gait projecting. It's nice, in this sense, the proposed Giurgola and Cicognani to the area of Campi Flegrei. This really is a proposed new urban fabric, directly suggestive of forms and expressions of the built fabric of the formal and functional variety of types, their different position in apples and plots. The grain of sensitivity is very often, even for a large extension design. But it feels that every building is different, the apple-town order is not enough, and that the modern way of living and building the city has as much as the previous relationship, the formal game margin from the block to the plot and still, between the land and the building. From apple to this plot and the building will not set or rigid orders and repetitive, but its flexibility goes perhaps the best guarantee if it would today still ideal city. As a tribute to plan Lamont Young of the century, geomorphological interpretationof-area, displays his three radial fingers clear a path as infrastructural support tissue. It is very well the relationship between the large scale of the project and attention to the different forms of occupation: the axis of grouping under Mount St. Teresa, the residential units as radburns water in the pouch, the grain often anecdotal and picturesque of the building, the more important that the geometries of the plant. The proposal Giurgola recognize comfortable suburban housing as a form of urban growth. Some of the images in this piece meal rating framed in urban road network may well turn geographic research topic for a modern residential area, so left-topic as necessary, in the last years. This project makes for a very different path, for example, to single family superblocks Milton Keynes or compact superblock Gregotti in Palermo. The recognition of individual character and private housing, promotion and design flexibility, and the mix of uses and types of contributions seem great experimental and theoretical interest. Giurgola, is a man who has shown great master and medium scale urbanisticos multiple jobs. Maybe not as widespread as it should, the appreciation of the historic city is reflected in the strength of their formal guidelines, to direct attention to the American city and contemporary forms of residential consumption. Alert since. If tissues are plotted and key issues of the current urban projection, no less so is the resolution of spaces or strategic points in the city both its meaning and its centrality. The suggestion of the place is surely leading to the proposal of Toni Diaz Park Buenos Aires. Developed as controversial idea for a public debate citizen, expressed, even in its graphics, somewhat archaic, the illusion that city sound made by the overlapping surfaces and straight green infrastructure with the ubiquitous high Le Corbusier played a progressive future for Buenos Aires.

In Salzburg an ambitious urban renewal program piloted by the assessor "green", launches a series of contests on critical areas in the city. Among them, the adequacy of Station Square, space particularly active in that city and is presented with the confusion of forms characteristic of modern urban transformations. The square, dominated by a noble building of the century rail, was enlarged and remodeled in the postwar period. Partly to accommodate late urban trips (bus, metro, tram, etc..), Emptying vast stops and parking spaces, and replacing part suburban residential building block adjacent longitudinal and apartment towers, commercial warehouse superstores, and vertical screen panoramic hotel. All this in normal operation. And yet, the city raises the importance of involving today, demolish, replace, change traffic, build new terminals, etc.. Sum of questions involving the entire city and summarized in a very specific area. Project work is to be immediate, while a conceptual hypothesis entire urban structure, and requires the interpretation of urban place as a starting point. When replacing Pierluigi Nicolin railroad strikes in Porta Genova, is implicit strategy especially the southern sector of Milan and at the same time, a host of projective hypothesis about the occupation of large interstitial voids in existing cities, old and new infrastructure of the city and on the scale of contemporary urban form. It is indeed a project that brings a sense of direct interpretation of where they are placed and which seeks to find its inner logic precisely the wealth of references and applications. The urban place is imposed as projecting content itself, without reference to architectural models, typological or monumental. The configuration of the urban place stems from the strategic position in the city, the conflict and the functional heterogeneity of symbolic and referential sense of their collective experience, topography and infrastructure as media forms. The language and style are unique, different, independent of pure architectural aesthetics, painting or design. The proposed recognition Nicolin rail frames just mimetic is a historical fact: it is above all the opportunity to gather for the new implementation, all the strength that urban form had gotten there. The spindles surprisingly sharp in the project are produced to the body under the tertiary center or to the craft market and trade on the Naviglio Grande would be in difficulty if a huge imprint imaginative perception of the entire eastern outskirts of the city. The redundancy between the trace road, the channel, the long rows of buildings that are drawn and senses ring general movement in a city as radial and concentric as Milan, make this project a proposed method for transforming urban fractures. There is a question of large scale and ambitious. There is also a clear conscience to act with effects beyond the scope of the project itself. I do not mind repeating that the scale is not the scale. The same teaches John Navarro in Turin project, unlike, the sad-contests for Bicoca or the Giudecca, where no designer has recognized the significance of a part for the whole city. I speak not only to recognize the interlocking

with the tissues or the surrounding landscape, nor to connect general infrastructure systems and movements, or even meet some claim symbolic, but above all to understand and look for innovative effects on conception the city as a whole. Why Juan Navarro project beyond himself? Your text explains: "maintain a balance between demands complex and contradictory", "to the extent of Turin", creating a spontaneous meeting between the free and natural structure of the river channel and the fabric of the city flood its banks. The Dora, as the general form of urban geography, geometry involved in the conflict with the forms built by urbanism and architecture. The logic of the project, being strictly rational in design, not part of any predetermined compositional order, of any formal model ideologically desired, but an empirical effort to interpret and invent inventing playing. Railroad traces give rise, with the number of its three bridges, a flush elegant design, modeling as a field coil excavated between different parts of the city. The bend in the river, leads to the formation of an artificial aquatic track, thinking Corso urban authority Umbria: sequences industrial office towers on one side and the other sports halls looking landscape scale fluvial axis as order urban composition. Notably always Beldeweg Navarro, the game between the apparent subtlest autonomy that strongly raises each of the main buildings of their projects, and the ground motion as a fundamental instrument of its syntax. His drawings always seem to express, for those who like to look at them, those long sections in which both are entrusted with very slight inflections of the profile. Only slight inflections in the graph, because it is known for its huge real effect because they become the very matter of the project, always understood as different game variations conceptual reference plane of the territory. Geography abstract, if you will. Urban Project provided by the expanded state of their ideas. Large urban engineering systems (railways, canals, bridges, towers, streets) have interested Navarro Nicolin and to do it with the city architecture. Architecture of the city that is the opposite of urban architecture buildings themselves and each other, however, architectural order of the physical body (spaces, fabrics and places) of the city. Created a significant burden on these projects takes typological expression of specific applications. The Baldeweg Navarro, has reduced tracks and sports halls to strictly modulated beautiful geometric units. Nicolin develops, very original, variants of the square block from intensive forms staggered in height to nearly detached house online, always an idea for urban housing that seeks the comfort and flexibility of use as well as the contribution of the building outside the urban form. Projecting the place is, well, the main method of what we call urban projects. Some projects that are not those of urban design Harvardian 60 (Sert, Soltan, Makki) nor the townscape of Cullen, nor the structuralism of Smithson, De Carlo, Bakkema, Tange and Team 10. Nor are the great design that Bacon sought the Philadelphia or Hugo Wilson in Cumbernauld. Do not believe in either or Glossling Krier, Alexander and Colin Rowe. Although some have, of course, all of them will have a pragmatic and operational, and professional ethics more ideological, because they also have a

great distrust of principles and appreciation for the finals too. As if there was a simplicity to trust the talent in building our cities ...