La duplice identità di abitare la vacanza. Cini Boeri. La Rotonda e la Casa bunker, la Maddalena, Olbia, 1966-67

Riflettere sui connotati del Moderno Mediterraneo attraverso due casi studio per individuare una κοινὴ comune a precisi confini geografici. Cini Boeri, uno tra i pochi volti femminili dell’architettura italiana del secondo dopoguerra, offre un’interpretazione assai personale dell’abitare. Definisce un modo altro, rigoroso ma flessibile, di vivere la casa, cucita addosso all’uomo, nella taglia perfetta: un abito come riparo, come stile di vita. E dove può cogliersi la massima attinenza tra corpo e sua protezione, abitante e costruzione, se non nello scenario vacanziero. La necessità di un ricovero, l’epifania di un desiderio inconscio trova collocazione nel Golfo dell’Abbatoggia, alla Maddalena. Qui la Boeri conforma, come un oggetto di design alla grande scala, lo spazio antropocentrico intorno e a misura d’uomo, del suo corpo come delle sue idee

Verso una rigenerazione operante della città

In the name of regeneration, the study on the historical city and the deep linkage between city and architecture is renewed. For years at the heart of the political agenda in Europe and worldwide, “urban regeneration” not only implies a comparison with history, but also global objectives of social inclusion, economic upturn, environmental sustainability. A design project is more difficult when placed in a historical context left to decay, a melting pot of different people and a crucial point in the metropolitan layout that calls for a complete and complex renew of the relation between architectural design and urban morphology. This is the case of the San Lorenzo district in Rome, an urban island intra moenia once was recognised for its archaeological- monumental heritage that is now recognisable for its anthropological-cultural mixité. This article aims to define guidelines and strategies that qualify design when it fits into a consolidated urban fabric, highlighting the role of morphology as an analytical prerequisite for interpreting the built landscape and a synthetic one for configuring new spaces as a natural evolution of reality. The challenge of contemporary design lies both in understanding and respecting the inner logic of a specific city neighbourhood and in making it unique and operating within a more complex and cross-scale system. Regenerating does not mean generating again, but knowing how to continue creating unity, continuity and vitality of the urban organism

Social Housing: How Covid-19 Has Affected/Infected and What Care/Design Strategy is Needed

For over a year, Covid-19 has rapidly imposed many changes not only in daily habits, but also in the adaptive capacity of the domestic space, imposing a functional reinterpretation to make it more flexible for multiple uses, such as home, office, gym, etc. Sensitive data on the indirect effects of the lockdown and on the houseinhabitant relationship show how new spatial needs have conditioned our physical and mental health as well as having produced cultural and socio-economic implications. Thus, the need to review home comfort and improve the quality of the indoor environment has become urgent, as well as to enhance contact with nature to live happier. This becomes more relevant in Social Housing, where moments and spaces for sharing represent the most characterizing aspect of the life of low and middle-income residents. The sector literature has dealt with this issue several times, especially in more recent times, but the results of the interrelation between Covid-19 and Social Housing are still poorly investigated and deserve further investigation. This paper aims to investigate the specific housing typology and to propose appropriate treatments as design strategies, to ensure healthier conditions of urban life. Through practical experimentation on an Italian case study, an emblematic example of economic and public housing in the urban history of Rome, the study will provide design solutions, graphic results and best practices that demonstrate the necessary updating of the architectural discipline in the light of a global pandemic, within the limits of a preliminary investigation which will suggest new ideas for the current debate on the subject

From nature to the city and back: the case of Piazzale Clodio, Rome

On the basis of complex urban realities that time dissolves into fragments, now punctual into the consolidated fabrics, now confined to the broken margins without coherence or dialectic with the sourroundings, it is difficult to image the city as an unified organism, alive, able to adapt to changing needs of society as nature. The task becomes more difficult in the analysis of development of a city like Rome and in specific reading of the area named Quartiere delle Vittorie, so much rooted in the collective imagination cause its history and unique morphology, recognizable due to the typical starry path signed by a controversial planning and to its relations with Quartiere Prati and Trionfale. A part of modern city, still incomplete. The urban fabric is adapting to a geometric matrix of linear paths, no orthogonal, converging towards the highest hill of the city: Monte Mario. They stop in front of orography, not comparing with the territory. There is not a pole to mark a fitting end to a design planned, but only an undefined area, degraded in the use and in the physical state, as the landscape around Piazzale Clodio. In a more general urban regeneration project it appears not only to architecture as a social art, able to reconnect communities, places and nature, but also as a process, in the reverse direction, which completes the anthropical realty from natural context, defining a unique landscape, that like every other living organism challenges its own limits, becoming into a continuous evolution

From nature to the city and back: the case of Clodio Square, Rome.

The topic is Piazzale Clodio, one of the unfinished edges of the city: on one side, it physically touches but does not integrate with the slopes of Monte Mario, whilst on the other side lies the built and consolidated city. The city as planned in 1909 stops at the edge of Circonvallazione Clodia, which it draws as its border; failing to advance due to the interruption from the messy front of Monte Mario.Today it looks like a slot of asphalt (an asphalt buttonhole) welcoming a confused flow of buses and cars: judges, lawyers and defendants cross it daily. It is a rather undefined space, a spit of indefinite land that glides downstream to meet up along the asphalt of Circonvallazione Clodia. Only several planted trees and huge advertising billboards conceal the unfinished nature of an empty square, which became a bus terminal, parking, junction and roundabout over time. In this special context a part of the urban fabric, confined between the Panoramic road, Via Teulada and Monte Mario, shows itself as ground parking and circus events, an undefined place full of potential where the city can reconnect to the landscape