L'arte per la costruzione dello spazio pubblico

The paper investigates the role of public art and its ability to construct public space, recognizing the principle of "convenience of the work to the quality of places". The intent is to highlight the complexity that in this construction process is due to the artistic generation of urban space, both as a design action and as a moment of possible convergence between architecture and other forms of art. When reading the evolution of urban space in a historical-critical way, in many cases it is possible to highlight the fundamental component of the "aesthetic operator" in the genetic process of the form of public space, regardless of cultural, functional, political or commercial purposes. In this genesis, for any work, be it architecture or or "visual arts", there are three moments in the process that bind together client, artistic creation and fruition (practical and / or aesthetic), all subjects with goals that, though different, they can converge into "urban making". From these assumptions the paper examines some realizations that show how the artistic component can create or regenerate urban placea; think, by exaggerating and summarizing the exemplification, of the value of art in the identity generation of places, such as, for example, the monumental statues of antiquity, but also, on the contrary, the identification of new urban environments, thanks to murals of modernity. The presented case studies and the topic of reasoning on the design and management of city spaces highlight practices in which an artistic production interacts with the space.