The Old and the New: Designs to Enhance Cesano Maderno Old Town through a Regenerative Structure

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Tourism-boosting rebuilding of historic buildings and urban form : the case study of Yanghe Tower and its urban morphology in Zhengding, China

Tourism has recently been viewed as an economic growth engine for Chinese small historic cities, including Zhengding in Northern China. However, the intensive tourism-boosting projects have far more impacts on these cities than merely economic development. Yanghe Tower was first built in Zhengding in the Tang Dynasty, renovated many times, and demolished in the 1960s, although it had been included in Liang- Sicheng's surveys in 1933. The local government rebuilt the Tower in 2017 to make it a tourist attraction through an uncritical rebuilding that formed an urban unit with a texture and meaning that never existed in the city. The result is a standalone monument disjointed from its historic and morphological layering, which is crucial for the Tower's urban role and memory narrative. This paper instead reads the primary element of Yanghe Tower in its historical evolution and its relationship with the overall urban form. By reading the mutual relationship between the Tower and the urban development in both permanence and modification, the paper brings evidence of the deep structure and meanings of urban form that should guide any strategy of intervention and reconstruction beyond musealization and commodification

Urban strata interpretation : Xi'an's fragile urban form inside the Ming City Wall

Within a troublesome notion of historicity, any attempt to deal with the fast re-development of Chinese historic cities needs to confront with a different concept of integrity, permanence, and memory of the historic space. The end of the 20th century and the beginning of 21st century, moreover, were particularly disruptive for historic cities where an unprecedented development took place on the ‘tabula rasa’ of all pre-existing typo-morphological orders. Despite its early preservation plan in the 1980s, the historic Ming City in Xi’an has retained only its major cultural symbols while continuing the erasure of historic urban textures, which fragments are now mostly traceable in the topography of the fabric patterns. Around the Ming City Wall, nonetheless, a composite tissue has grown onto old traces and fabrics, defining an assemblage of typo-morphological forms and topographical traces that should be considered historicised as well. If understood as a ‘tabula plena’, this miscellaneous text could be regenerated and enhanced to support complexity and the restoration of a local identity rather than being indistinctively demolished in the name of a homogeneous stylistic coordination for touristic exploitation. The multiple times and memories absorbed in this composite layering of traces reveal the essential cultural meaning of urban form and the continuous need of interpretative tools to support a coevolutionary sustainable development. The paper focuses its analysis on both structure and morphology of Xi’an Ming City’s urban forms and characters, deepening the understanding of the urban substrata in the Jiangguo District

Liu Kecheng. Going through Historical Space

Il tema del libro è il rapporto necessario e fecondo tra le tracce urbane dell’antico e la riscrittura operata dal progetto di architettura, colto attraverso l’opera di uno dei più autorevoli protagonisti dell’architettura cinese contemporanea. Lavorando come massimo esperto in molte delle più importanti aree archeologiche, l’opera dell’architetto si connota, unica in Cina, per il rapporto diretto con le origini della città, assurte a specifico campo di conoscenza. Pur all’interno di processi incontrollabili di rapida urbanizzazione e di estrema frammentazione delle competenze e condizioni di lavoro, il progetto di architettura si afferma come lo strumento necessario e più efficace per contrastare la strategia della tabula rasa e promuovere invece la conservazione, il recupero e la valorizzazione dei segni e dei siti storici, dei paesaggi culturali urbani ed extraurbani. In questo ‘laboratorio’ cinese il progetto di architettura si esprime compiutamente come strumento necessario e privilegiato per la conoscenza, l’interpretazione, la presentazione al pubblico dei segni e delle fragili tracce archeologiche dell’origine antica della città, ricostruendone una figurazione reinterpretativa autenticamente moderna piuttosto che una ricostruzione, impossibile, dell’‘originale’ e una nuova narrazione. Nei progetti di architettura come in quelli a scala urbana, i progetti rendono leggibile un palinsesto fragile ma autentico, che necessariamente contamina reperto, architettura e città. Al tempo stesso, il rispetto per l’autenticità diacronica e per ogni forma di testimonianza della storia, lo impegna a conservare e dare dignità a tutte le testimonianze del passato, risignificandole mediante nuovi temi e innesti. Dissolvenza, rispecchiamento, isomorfismo, sono alcune delle strategie di intervento che si traducono in precisi temi della composizione