621 research outputs found
Relazioni disegnano spazi: il canale villoresi come occasione di riqualificazione e riconnessione degli spazi pubblici urbani
No full textAccording to many urbanists public spaces could be generated by a prior and unitary order result of a planned design. We should focus on connecting and reporting more than building. Our opportunity is to concentrate on builded space, reclaiming and retraining what we already have. Requalification is the way to act, the new therapy of spaces: new networks of relations generate new spaces for the community.
Villoresi canal is the case study that we are using to verify this new attitude. It is sited in the north of Milan, where, after Milan-city, we have the most populous and urbanized territory of the entire region. In this part of the region we can find a density of 4.000 inhab/kmq instead of 415 inahab/kmq according to the regional average.
The city centers spread around claiming all they could. The north of Milan is characterized by a presence, often forgotten, of Villoresi Canal, a canal that links Ticino river to Adda river developing itself for 86 km. This canal is the opportunity, the resource, that all the cities in the north should exploit designing a new greenway, an ecological corridor. The canal will become the more important thread of the net that can link all the cities in the north of Milan and can become an example for similar metropolitan areas. A network of relations that can generate new public spaces
Tra Natura e Artificio: il canale Villoresi come Infrastruttura Urbana
No full textNella pianura tra Ticino a Adda, fortemente antropizzata, si inserisce il Canale Villoresi, infrastruttura idraulica, capace di collegare parti di territorio che variano dal paesaggio agricolo ad aree residenziali.
Il gestore di questa è il Consorzio Est Ticino Villoresi che si occupa di bonificare e irrigare quest’area e di valorizzare le acque e la rete a fini energetici, paesaggistici, turistici e ambientali. Attraverso sperimentazioni didattiche e di ricerca in sinergia tra il Consorzio e la Scuola di Architettura Civile del Politecnico di Milano si vuole dimostrare come questa infrastruttura idraulica possa diventare promotrice di riqualificazione ambientale e creatrice di nuovi spazi pubblici aperti per la collettività. Si tratta di rigenerare un sistema di spazi aperti, modificando fisicamente i luoghi in rapporto con l’acqua
Unveiling City Identity through Water
No full textAn exponential and badly managed use of land has led to a progressive crisis of open spaces. They become residues in-between the cities, the marginal part of the fragmented urban periphery in
contact with still agricultural areas. In these territory waterways represent an important connecting element with environmental and sustainable potentialities able to create a new system with open
spaces, in and outside the city, becoming opportunity to rebuild structures of meanings and to give back habitability to the open spaces of the future city.
The potential of these projects is not only responding to evident ecological and biodiversity possibilities, but also to a real management of the resource that has to be in synergy with local and
regional administrations. The designs dealing with open spaces along waterways have to have in themselves an effective character over a long period, on one side able to adapt to the economic potential and management of local governments, on the other able to provide a tool to indicate guidelines and objectives for the management of the territory and future cities.
With this goal the research wants to investigate the territory around Milano that, as Carlo Cattaneo said, is based on an historical tradition characterized by an important domestication work
conducted by man on the water, claiming, in the nineteenth century, the primacy of Lombardy in the field of hydraulic science and agriculture. Today what’s left of the domestication work are natural
areas, often residual, in between a territory made of spaces strongly anthropic, where dwelling is the new protagonist and where open space for citizen public life is reduced and without quality as well as fragmentary on urban fringes.
The research has set up either through didactic research, specifically through courses dealing with the topic of open spaces from the territorial scale to the specific one of single places with them
equipments, either through funded research, shared with public institutions, making strong links between didactic and local policies of territorial government to think about and create a new
development of the future city in relation with water (a vast topic evidenced by the work done and in progress for the Villoresi Canal that crosses whole the territory North of Milano).
The studies made on the canal demonstrate how waterways become strategic places where public firm and local authorities should invest to create new urban areas and a new image of cities in relation with water, follow a trend witnessed by urban regeneration projects that especially in the last thirty years characterized and continue to characterize the cities and towns around the world
Change the city, Design the Water
No full textUrban regeneration projects and initiatives are producing, especially in the last thirty years, a strong change in the pattern of urban public spaces in European cities: architectural design stands as a true «treatment of space» (Emery, 2008), where its purpose is to «protect the public value of undeveloped natural areas» disclosing «the strategic preciousness of places even if minimal» (Ottolini, 2002). Within this new process of transformation, rediscovery and new configurations of urban public spaces, water is recognized as an important resource structuring the new open spaces, thanks to a new ecological awareness, reading the form and the role in order to adapt to the changes that the city and society have matured.
This paper dwells on a specific case study that explains how the architectural process, within the design of the water presence in the territory, becomes an important feature for re-qualification, designing the public space for the community.
The case study is sited in the north of Milan, in the middle of the città infinita (Bonomi, 2004), where, after Milan-city, we have the most populous and urbanized territory of the entire region. In this part of the region we can find a density of 4.000 inhab/km2 instead of 415 inhab/km2 according to the regional average. The city centers of this area spread around claiming all the space they could. The north of Milan is characterized by the presence, often forgotten, of the Villoresi Canal, a canal that links Ticino river to Adda river unraveling itself for 86 km. This canal is the opportunity and the resource that all the cities in the north should exploit.
In this scarcity of free land, where all the cities are expanding, in 2001 Regione Lombardia started to give indications and rules to cities in order to preserve the landscape that is disappearing with time. Every water course, natural or man made, is considered a common patrimony, according to the regional decree, and so is the Villoresi canal. It is a water infrastructure in origin built in the countryside with the only purpose of irrigation. Nowadays, the cities moved forward, surrounding the canal without it becoming a feature of the city-life. The 2001 law gives to the canal 10 meters on each side of free unbuilt space and promotes in an area of 200 meters roughly, green connections, pedestrian and cycle paths, ecological corridors...
The canal will become the most important thread of the net that can link all the cities in the north of Milan and it can become an example for similar metropolitan areas. A network of relations that can generate new public spaces. In this way the water could come back to play a central role not only in the conformation of the open spaces of the city but also in social processes, returning to the community new living spaces: architecture as «the weighed construction of space» (L. I. Kahn: Bonati, 2002) with its geometry, its dimensions, from the planimetric relations with the context to the scale of furniture, the human scale. The project becomes the interpreter of places of the city in direct contact with water, forming a complex network of relationships. It’s all about grasping the potential that the complex experiential relationship between man and water allows, interweaving with the living body, full of signs and tracks, of the open spaces of the city
Informal Open Spaces Designed by Water
No full text“Although the process of formalization is the dominant trend in modern social life, informality is the essential element in constructing trust relationships and, thus, in any cooperative arrangement aimed at improving the quality of life. [...] Only a society that achieves an optimal balance between informality and formality of interactional practices is in position to create the conditions to cooperation and innovation»1.
Water has accompanied both man’s life and landscape conformation, setting the rhythm of their changes and evolution and answering practical and symbolic needs. In this way it became an element of comunication or separation, means of defense but also possible source of danger.
Life and man cannot be without it yet they need to protect themselves from it.
Water thanks to its nature becomes promoter of human relations and artifice of different places (dockings along sea or river borders, terrace on water, places for recreation, places for rest, pauses inside cities...). If on one hand its role of basic common good has always been recognized, in modern times even entering everyday life on an individual level, on the other the presence of water in public open space, that in the beginning of the past century was regarded more as a threat and an obstacle to city expansion, losing its old aggregative and social character, nowadays it becomes renovating resource for urban requalification re-considering, re-interpreting and re-inventing its presence.
This new role is assigned to water because it’s able to ignite unique possibilities of relation and use linked mainly, but not only, to evocative and symbolic qualities and also to functional and ludic values of this extraordinary element, since interacting with water it’s an informal and collective activity.
Architectural elements of the project in contact with water aren’t really answering to a function but to an use/experience that man can have with it. The design of these elements changes the use of space and consequently the way to live places of the cities, offering new possibilities linked to an informality made by the presence of this element.
If in architecture the use of water as actual construction material is clear (as Carlo Scarpa2 used it), grasping its potential gets more difficult when it becomes actively part of the space3 entrusted to the architectural design that will shape its features providing it with an informality that is necessary to render the place inhabitable and inhabitated.
1. Barbara A. Misztal. 1999. Informality: Social Theory and Contemporary Practice. London: Biddles Ltd.
2.«Scarpa lavorava l'acqua, lavorava la luce, lavorava le superfici dei soffitti a stucco lucido con piani fra loro inclinati per ottenere un certo riverbero dovuto al movimento della luce e dell'acqua e all'intersezione dei piani» R. Giovanardi, Carlo Scarpa e l'acqua, Cicero, Venezia, 2006. [Scarpa worked water, worked light, worked ceiling surfaces with polished plaster thanks to inclined planes, to obtaine some reverb due to light and water movement and to intersection of planes] Author translation.
3.(Raum): «it’s acting-and making space that speaks in the word space. This means to make a clearing, to consolidate. To make space brings freedom, openness for man to settle in and live in [...] to make space is to make a free gift of places. It is a happening that speaks and is hidden at the same time in making space» Heidegger, M., (1969). Die kunst der Raum, St. Gallen: Erker Verlag. (trad. It. Heidegger, M. (2000). L’arte e lo spazio. Genova: Il nuovo melangolo
Relations Design Spaces
No full textAccording to many urbanists, public spaces could be generated by a prior and unitary order, result of a planned design. The scarcity of public spaces forces architects and urbanists to look deeply at what the environment provides. Requalification is the way to act, the new therapy of spaces, focused on connecting and linking more than building.
Through the case study of Villoresi Canal the paper want to explain how new networks of relations generate new spaces for the community. The north of Milan is characterized by its presence, often forgotten, a canal that links Ticino river to Adda river developing itself for 86 km.
The canal, sited where, after Milan-city, we have the most populous and urbanized territory of the entire region -in this part of the region we can find a density of 4.000 pop./km2 instead of 415 pop./km2, the regional average- is the opportunity, the resource, that all the cities in the north should exploit designing a new greenway, an ecological corridor.
In this scarcity of free land and public spaces, where all the cities are increasing, the Regione Lombardia in 2001 started to give indications and rules to cities in order to preserve the landscape that is disappearing with time. Every water course, natural or man made, is considered a common heritage, according to the regional decree, and so is the Villoresi canal, water infrastructure built originally in the countryside with the only purpose of irrigation. Nowadays, the cities moved forward, surrounding the canal without it becoming a feature of the city-life. The 2001 law gives to the canal 10 meters on each side of free unbuilt space and promotes in an area of 200 meters roughly, green connections, pedestrian and cycle paths, ecological corridors...
Thanks to these new attitudes the canal will become the more important thread of the net that can link all the cities in the north of Milan: a network of relations that can generate new public spaces
l canale Villoresi tra natura e artificio. Riqualificazione urbana e riconnessione degli spazi pubblici aperti
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Caterina Colombini, o della cugina sedotta. Una ‘ricostruzione’ della figura di Caterina attraverso i testi
No full textIn this essay the author demonstrates that it is possible to “reconstruct” the figure of Caterina Colombini (1340?-1387) – Giovanni Colombini’s cousin – through a group of texts: the hagiography of Caterina, the letters sent to her by Giovanni Colombini and, finally, Giovanni’s biography written by Feo Belcari. The author divides his text into four parts: the first part analyzes the content of Caterina’s hagiography; the second examines the linguistic form of the hagiographic text; in the third, the author analyzes the latent meaning of the window, a symbolic place where Giovanni and Caterina converse on divine topics; in the last part, to conclude, the teachings that Giovanni gives to Catherine and her spiritual daughters – the Gesuate – are analyzed
Il Canale Villoresi come occasione di riqualificazione e riconnessione degli spazi aperti pubblici urbani.
No full textSince the beginning of the last century a progressive and esponential process of urbanization and infrastructuring has occured in the territory of Lombardia, especially in the neighboring areas of the conurbation of Milano-city and in the zone of high plain enclosed between Ticino and Adda (la città infinita1, the infinite-city). In this territorial framework of spaces strongly anthropic, mainly residential, –where the open spaces for the public life of citizens result reduced and disqualified, not to mention fragmented – natural, often residual, areas are just at urban bondaries. Right in this area there is regional (and also national) peak of settlement density2. Here, in this compromised landscape, flows the Villoresi Canal, an hydraulic infrastructure that as a thread links different parts of land that are varying from agricultural landscape to urban fringe areas and also to public housing neighbourhoods. To verify the potential of this hydraulic infrastructure didactic sperimentation and researches are carried out by a sinergy between Consorzio di Bonifica Est Ticino Villoresi (managing institution of the Canal) and the School of Civil Architecture of Politecnico di Milano
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