Stratigraphies: archaeology as a threshold and passage

Like every phase of the history of thought, the contemporary age ponders over the meaning of the past. Thinking back over places that already have a history in the archaeological sense leads us to certain questions that concern, at close range, our way of understanding design, the city and the territory. The need for the ideas of our times to interact with these sites, with their sedimented past, has determined a variety of solutions, some with a historical-philological focus, others aimed at revitalisation, yet others in which design chooses the path of non-intervention and, finally, some - and this is the aspect we will analyse - aimed at interacting and creating contact with the past, with a mechanism fit to generate new spatial, social and behavioural principles. This vision necessarily considers the past as matter that is alive and under tension, and grasps bonds with it as extraordinary opportunities, excludes mimicry and philology, aware that the past as such has changed over time. What remains is a substance endowed with meaning, a meaning that comes alive again through interpretation and the yielding of value and new life to the present. The design discipline is implementing numerous courses and we can summarise them under the concept of archaeology and trace. Archaeology is a subject linked by its nature to history and calls up an archaic dimension, whereas the trace takes us into the world of interpretation, analysis, and research based on circumstantial evidence. In Post-modern years there was talk of the end of narration and of the need to focus once more on the list. According to this idea the necessary information had to be retrieved from the past and could then be freely assembled to form a framework, but it gave debatable results for architecture was being turned into an eclectic, citationist construct. We need to take a step backwards, towards the end of the Sixties, to pick out, from among the themes investigated by Michel Foucault, reflections on history that in present times refocus on disciplinary aspects. In 1969, with L'archéologie du savoir (The archaeology of knowledge), the French philosopher had undermined the model of history that advanced, recorded and invoked strata, archaeological levels and thresholds founded on different planes, involving the city as much as society. Foucault maintained that the strata of history overlapped, "they intersect without being able to be reduced to a linear pattern" (Foucault 1980). The French philosopher had formalised this unavoidable relation between memory and past, including life as an internal process. History, eliminating the irruption of events, was interpreted as an ideal, coherent and, consequently, linear model. Foucault introduced the principle of heterotopia, of the co-presence of various times in the same place, belonging as much to the past as to the present. Memory is deeply different from the past, in that it is coloured by the present, is alive and "darns" experiences, rewriting them to be able to exist and be able to carry on narrating. Whereas the past, as such, shows what there was, the times passed through, what has inexorably disappeared. Memory, on the other hand, questions time, calls it back to itself like a pressing need of redefinition. With L'archéologie du savoir, Michel Foucault challenged a structure of knowledge that was unidirectional, linked with univocal power, calling up differences, schedules and the multitudes of signifiers and polysemic elements. The analysis the French philosopher constructed on history adapts well to highlighting the stratigraphic and topographic complexity of the city, analysed in its evolution. The city sums up different times and phases of development in its structuring, so as to make it a complex structure of passages, and of temporal thresholds

Aldo Rossi: the 'autobiography' and its fragments

Abstract The year 1966 demarcated a borderline in the urban design discipline. Three books published that indicated a change of direction: City architecture by Aldo Rossi, The territory of architecture by Vittorio Gregotti and Complexity and contradiction in architecture by Robert Venturi. Aldo Rossi, in contact with Ernesto Nathan Rogers and "Casabella-Continuità", shifted the attention to the historic, consolidated city, the monument and urban rules of archaeological fabric, while Vittorio Gregotti developed a research trend that founded architecture on geography. Finally, Robert Venturi opened up the architectural project, revealing its relations with media culture and with the contradictions of the consumer society. Critical essays investigated the phase following the second half of the Sixties, at the time when Aldo Rossi began, in 1976, to travel across America, invited by the Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies to show his works at a series of exhibitions. His book A Scientific Autobiography, written and developed in America, belonged to this phase, which characterised at an international level by the birth of Paper Architecture (the movement that had placed design at the centre of reflection as the expression of new spatial poetics). The essay aimed to show a change in the paradigm of Rossi's thought, no longer and solely focusing on past and physical architecture, but unrelentingly entwined with the individual and personal destiny of the Milanese architect. Memory became an active, live field of investigation, as Rafael Moneo maintains on Rossi's thought, in which an objective vision of architecture no longer counted but one that included the subject and his fragments

Abandoned landscape project design

AbstractConversion and transformation of historic buildings and industrial site reclamation projects are becoming topics of renewed interest. Many industrial buildings beckon architecture design theory to revitalize urban areas and make new use of public space. Ruins and historic sites speak to us about the need to rethink settings which belong to long-lost ages and yet are contemporary in the stories they reveal. There are present-day problematic and sensitive areas (abandoned quarries, ex industrial plants, landfills, etc.) which inspire renewed critical thinking; themes of memory and recollection touch us in the here and now. In contrast with the 1970s and 1980 s' tendency to treat such topics with a mix of lightheartedness and nostalgia, the projects presented in this work regard history as a process of revision and reclamation of profound spatial and social principles. Contact with historic, industrial and modern spaces pushes us to apply new methodological approaches in an effort to re-write the present. In fact, nowadays it is imperative that we engage a relationship with the past which takes into consideration not only ancient legacies but also those entrenched in 20th century crises—uncomfortable memories often embodied in areas of great landscape or historic value. How are we to approach our relationship with these legacies? Critical studies illustrate the value of those projects capable of breathing new life into the fabric of urban space by creating public areas and city parks. Memory, seemingly pushed into a playful, irreverently lighthearted vein for years, is thus allowed once again to speak to us of the human and social desire to reclaim time and provide urban and suburban areas with new opportunities for regeneration and growth

The rootstock shape microbial diversity and functionality in the rhizosphere of Vitis vinifera L. cultivar Falanghina

The rhizosphere effect occurring at the root-soil interface has increasingly been shown to play a key role in plant fitness and soil functionality, influencing plants resilience. Here, for the first time, we investigated whether the rootstock genotype on which Vitis vinifera L. cultivar Falanghina is grafted can influence the rhizosphere microbiome. Specifically, we evaluated to which extent the 5BB and 1103P rootstocks are able to shape microbial diversity of rhizosphere environment. Moreover, we explored the potential function of microbial community and its shift under plant genotype influence. We investigated seven vineyards subjected to the same pedo-climatic conditions, similar age, training system and management and collected twelve rhizosphere soil samples for metagenomic analyses and composite soil samples for physical-chemical properties. In this study, we used 16S rRNA gene-based metagenomic analysis to investigate the rhizosphere bacterial diversity and composition. Liner discriminant analysis effect size (LEFSe) was conducted for metagenomic biomarker discovery. The functional composition of sampled communities was determined using PICRUSt, which is based on marker gene sequencing profiles. Soil analyses involved the determination of texture, pH, Cation Exchange Capacity (CSC), Organic Carbon (OC), electrical conductivity (EC), calcium (Ca), magnesium (Mg), potassium (K) content, Phosphorous (P), nitrogen (N). The latter revealed that soil features were quite homogenous. The metagenomic data showed that the bacterial alpha-diversity (Observed OTUs) significantly increased in 1103P rhizosphere microbiota. Irrespective of cultivar, Pseudomonadota was the dominant phylum, followed by Actinomycetota > Bacteroidota > Thermoproteota. However, Actinomycetota was the major marker phyla differentiating the rhizosphere microbial communities associated with the different rootstock types. At the genus level, several taxa belonging to Actinomycetota and Alphaproteobacteria classes were enriched in 1103P genotype rhizosphere. Investigating the potential functional profile, we found that most key enzyme-encoding genes involved in N cycling were significantly more abundant in 5BB rootstock rhizosphere soil. However, we found that 1103P rhizosphere was enriched in genes involved in C cycle and Plant Growth Promotion (PGP) functionality. Our results suggest that the different rootstocks not only recruit specific bacterial communities, but also specific functional traits within the same environment

The LANDSUPPORT geospatial decision support system (S-DSS) vision: Operational tools to implement sustainability policies in land planning and management

Nowadays, there is contrasting evidence between the ongoing continuing and widespread environmental degradation and the many means to implement environmental sustainability actions starting from good policies (e.g. EU New Green Deal, CAP), powerful technologies (e.g. new satellites, drones, IoT sensors), large databases and large stakeholder engagement (e.g. EIP-AGRI, living labs). Here, we argue that to tackle the above contrasting issues dealing with land degradation, it is very much required to develop and use friendly and freely available web-based operational tools to support both the implementation of environmental and agriculture policies and enable to take positive environmental sustainability actions by all stakeholders. Our solution is the S-DSS LANDSUPPORT platform, consisting of a free web-based smart Geospatial CyberInfrastructure containing 15 macro-tools (and more than 100 elementary tools), co-designed with different types of stakeholders and their different needs, dealing with sustainability in agriculture, forestry and spatial planning. LANDSUPPORT condenses many features into one system, the main ones of which were (i) Web-GIS facilities, connection with (ii) satellite data, (iii) Earth Critical Zone data and (iv) climate datasets including climate change and weather forecast data, (v) data cube technology enabling us to read/write when dealing with very large datasets (e.g. daily climatic data obtained in real time for any region in Europe), (vi) a large set of static and dynamic modelling engines (e.g. crop growth, water balance, rural integrity, etc.) allowing uncertainty analysis and what if modelling and (vii) HPC (both CPU and GPU) to run simulation modelling 'on-the-fly' in real time. Two case studies (a third case is reported in the Supplementary materials), with their results and stats, covering different regions and spatial extents and using three distinct operational tools all connected to lower land degradation processes (Crop growth, Machine Learning Forest Simulator and GeOC), are featured in this paper to highlight the platform's functioning. Landsupport is used by a large community of stakeholders and will remain operational, open and free long after the project ends. This position is rooted in the evidence showing that we need to leave these tools as open as possible and engage as much as possible with a large community of users to protect soils and land

Toyo Ito. La costruzione del vuoto

Collana "Gli Architetti" Prefazione di A. Saggio "Toyo Ito. Senza respiro"Necklace "" The Architects "" Preface to A. Essay "" Toyo Ito. Without breath "

Una fase storica nuova per i paesaggi italiani / New interpretative scenarios for the evolution of Italian landscapes

The analysis of the historical series 1990-2018 of the European territorial data base Corine Land Cover suggests new interpretative keys for the understanding of land cover dynamics in Italian landscapes. A new evolutionary phase of the Italian landscapes is outlined, characterized by the lack of guiding processes, and by a complex territorial metabolism, which requires new and appropriate landscape policies

Progettare le transizioni. Immaginazione in azione: pratiche, strumenti e impianti teorici per il progetto come ricerca

Il saggio introduce i temi della ricerca che articolano la sessione del convegno