Knottings

The term knotting indicates the outcome of the constructive act of connecting together the different elements of a structure, in order to form a spatial knot within the architectural or urban organism, often covering a space, so as to connect the surrounding structures, usually consisting of a series of type at the urban scale, by analyzing its origins, development and diffusion. As happened in many cases of the past, born from the dialectic between the fence and the cover, the serial and the organic structures, between the city and the building, knots form a sort of “urban palaces”, intended as an organic complex of many elements, originally autonomous. Starting from the French bastides, and continuing with the genesis of the Spanish Plazas Mayores we will search for the process at the base of a type that, once formally settled, has been coded and widely used until the modern era, as it will be shown in the analysis of some cases belonging to different geographical and cultural contexts, like the Don Bosco district in Rome, the Barrio Civico in Santiago, Chile, the district of the port in Le Havre and the MDM (Marszalkowska Housing District) in Warsaw. The methodology employed for this research is based on the so-called “processo formativo” of the architectural organism considered at the scale of the urban fabric