Archiprix International 2001
Università di Roma La Sapienza, Prima Facoltà di Architettura 'Ludovico Quaroni' - Rome, Italy
Valentina Sabatelli
Marco Pastore
Tutors: Prof. Arch. Salvatore Dierna, Dr Arch. Fabrizio Tucci
Project of a Settlement Unit in Ecological Conformity in the Oriental Directional System of RomeWe had planned a urban settlement string-pattern consisting in tertiary infrastructures (university, railstation, administrive department, eco-park) in marginal areas of Rome, in vast degenerated void caused by an irrational development of the urban web, in-between a highway and a railway. During the planning process, ground and underground, building and landscape have been considered as unitary resources. The preliminary analysis that supported the planning consisted in scanning the site and singling out the fluxes of matter and energy, placing in light the complex interactions between bio-logical, bio-phisical and bio-climatic process. The area has been seen as a place where dynamical fluxes of dual origin - material (men, commodities, animals, vegetation) and immaterial (radiation, air, energy) - interact in a continuous but not linear way, following a ‘natural’ cyclical course, dictated by the climatic variations. The research has lead us to define an eco-suistainable settlement pattern and to propose a compatible use of re-newable energetic resources, so to garantee a well-balanced condition between settlement structures, anthropic activities and evironmental system. Beginning from the ground modelling, the project has given rise to a manipulation and integration process between connective spaces, open and covered, natural and artificial, between principal and secundary routes and volumes, tending to assure a strongly marked morphologic order and a multi-connotative spatiality, in which the environmental quality of building spaces will be constantly assured. The superstring theory - explaining that the morphogenetic origin of the universe is thought to be based on the vibrational mode of strings that have no thickness but do have a length - inspired us with the vision of a landscape in stripes, continuous and undulating, which ran along the area filling its interstitial spaces. The architectonic form turns out to be the resultant of a series of passages of isomorphic transformations, that induce the abstraction to materialize in form, in function and in structure. The strings are composed on linear sequences of vibrations in a whole of interacting geo-sensitive answers: they are empathicly shaped by the ground morphology and its correlate bio-flux developed in space-time, howewer recepting some pre-estabilished compositive rules, similar to a Bach’s musical codifying process: inversion, counterpoint, augmentation, stratification, intersection, superimposition. Since the inputs are organized in stripes containing their self-reproducing codes, the strings are information vectors, their dynamical movements generate forms, gradually becoming stratified in a well-balanced mineral and vegetal, external and internal connection. Such forms, dilated and in expansion are condensed in the 'sensible spaces'; where space pulses, human activities contextually concentrate. We are conscious that we are planning in an entropic system: the strategies applied to the planning of the urban void can result in the light of the process illustrated by Bertrand Russel: 'Every time there is a great amount of energy in one region and a very little in a near one, the energy tends to move from one region to the other until an equilibrium is established. This whole process can be considered as a tendency towards democracy'. This assumption introduces a new modus pensandi: the entropic vision of the world promotes an empathic science, based upon the recovery of the sense of relation and participation to life on the planet in opposition with conventional science (mechanicalist and newtonian) which emphasizes the sense of disjunction and exploitation of nature and environment. In an entropic cultural dimension, architecture becomes an extension of environment: it has to favour the energetic and material fluxes through the creation of interacting, continuous, fluid spaces, organized in permeable and flexible settlement systems.