La seconda natura e lo sforzo sapiente

Abstract

In the lecture “The town in extension”, Samonà asserts that the second nature (Cicerone, De natura deorum), characterized by anthropical but not urbanized open spaces, will not be wilderness again. On the contrary the artificial, whose it is characterized, strengthened through an architecture project, can prevent the dissolution of the countryside into the scattered town. According to this point of view, in the research Prin 2009, we studied the part of the Sicilian territory, between Isola delle Femmine and Partinico, where the airport and Palermo have a centripetal force on the agricultural areas. We observed that the small centres have lost their attraction, the agricultural cultivations are no more profitable and the road infrastructures are prevalent in the project of the urban expansions. Some inspections and the overlapping of the selected cartographies, in the research of archives, allowed to elaborate a planimetrical project including the open spaces. Inside this last one, we spotted five scopes of project intervention where the faced questions concerne the relationship between open spaces, inhabited centres, settlement dispersion and infrastructures. The outward contrast between the architecture project and the protection of the countryside is cancelled through the metaphor of the counter fire, a technique which requires a “wise effort”. The architecture, as the fire, can give shape and make the countryside recognizable, redefining the sides of the open spaces. This is the objective of the research, through some project hypothesis, it designs a new wide town where built and cultivated lands search for a possible balance.