La ricostruzione della forma urbana. Monopoli. Spazi di natura e luoghi pubblici lungo la costa orientale.

The content of this essay refers to the application research on the grammars of urban form that authors conducted during the international workshop erasmus intensive programme "Re_build the Urban Form" in 2013 . The aim of design work has been the definition of new settlement grammars of exemplary methodological value, able to express a meaningful relationship between form of the land and urban form. The case study is represented by Monopoli, medium-sized coastal city south of Bari in which project areas are sites "of crisis" of the urban form along its Southern coast. Connoted by the presence of abandoned buildings and empty unresolved spaces, them have a value of limit, one as “gate” of ancient city, the second as edge of the city towards "natural" open spaces of great landscape value (sea and countryside). Coast has an embattled shape, a continuous system of recesses and protrusions of the coast-line, produced by alternation of rocky coast and lower sand creeks, placed at the end of lame, deep incisions of karst landscape with a flat bottom and semi-vertical walls, not very deep, that rises from reliefs. Creeks are inside places of rocky cliff that extends perpendicularly to the coast-line, dug out by erosive processes that put in evidence cliff parts between two following creeks. First project area is occupied by a disused school in front of old city walls near Porta Vecchia creek; the other is a terrain vague in the peripheral urban fabric, along an anonymous waterfront indifferent to natural form of coast-line characters, directly under lee of a remarkable dimensions creek. Design themes linked to the form of the land are two: one is a urban terrace as a public place in nature and coincident with a protrusion of the coast-line shape towards the sea, in analogy with S. Stefano fortified abbey; the second is an inside natural space built putting in relation settlement/dwelling unit form with system lama-creek form and orientation, in opposition to the outside space of country. In the first case the excellence of the place, is exalted by project: it is constituted of an inhabited podium, unitary but articulated into three connected bodies, oriented towards old city and Porta Vecchia creek, open sea and southern broken coast-line. Under open superior spaces of terrace there are inside chthonic spaces, similar to those at ground level of castle Carlo V. In the second case, project area has the role of threshold between contemporary city and country and correspond to a double deep system lama-creek. The project assumes the scale of the big unitary architecture as masserie, abbeys and express, through perfection of settlement and morphologic unit, the value of urban fact (Rossi A., 1967). Project interpret in analogic way the grammar of the form (Monestiroli A., 1999) that ancient city assume in correspondence of natural creeks as Portovecchio and Batterie to build “water rooms”, inside spaces of the creeks, in which community represent itself. The internal space is a system of two deep open courts, opposite one another: the smaller looks at urban fabric, the bigger includes natural space extended towards creek. The disciplinary aim of experience was to define new settlement/dwelling models through experimental urban designs in continuity with tradition, given that they are coherent in their general principles and evocative of forms belonging to the collective memory. The didactic objective was to introduce the students, through theoretical considerations, analytical reasoning and experimental design, to the knowledge of a working methodology applicable to similar environments and cities