Searching for the measure

Abstract

In the Sixties of last century Manfredo Tafuri presented its city layout based on a linear relation binding the words urban planning - town design – architecture on Casabella’s pages. This progression, underlain by the concept of scale proposed by the Modernist Movement, resulted from the interpretation of the urban project as confined between the boundlessness of urban planning and the finiteness of buildings. The studies and research connected with some Italian practices searching for the utility of the architectural project in terms of synthetic transdisciplinary intersection, focused essentially on this contradiction. In 1959 the competition for Barene di San Giuliano in Mestre divided the research works on urban topics between an operational methodology, rules of urban fabric composition, and the need for a dimensional progression of artefacts onto which a new strategy to restore order in the scattered city, could be founded. Embodied by Saverio Muratori’s Estuario project and by Ludovico Quaroni’s crescent, the two proposals for the Barene, in spite of being alternative, stemmed from the idea that an urban project is a recognizable blend of boundlessness and finiteness for an omnicomprehensive composition without any scalar definitions. On one hand Muratori’s and Quaroni’s studies based on a progression from the building to the city and on the other hand in the same years Gregotti’s studies on The Shape of Territory, putting forward an interest in the aesthetic aspects of land morphology and on the figurative function of geography as setting antecedent to the city, postulated innovative methodological and formal non-scalar practices appliable to the anthropogeographic landscape.