Attrattori urbani, luoghi comuni della città che cura

Urban attractors are architectures whose character is recognizable as the commonplace of the city they care for, because they are able to activate new relationships between the parts of a building and its context, improving the lifestyle of those who live there. They are characterized by the functional interweaving and are based on flexibility, interaction and sharing of space. The design actions that configure the architectural form of urban attractors must rethink the traditional typological structure: the modernist syntactic structure, based on the primacy of the plan, is replaced by the notion of layout, which has a device role in the asymptotic structure of contemporaneity. With the aim of promoting healthier lifestyles, the attractor, becomes an infrastructure of spaces and social relations of the urban landscape, where the interaction between the parts of a building and between the building and the city is produced. The constitutive principle of urban attractors in positive body care actions is their movement through. In the 20th century, in addition to the idea of the separation of isolated health care in sanatoriums, asylums and hospitals, located outside of population centers, body care enters into school education programs. In Italy the building complexes of the Opera Nazionale Balilla were structures located within the city and dedicated to recreational, health and educational functions, whose effects of social inclusion were strongly intertwined with the neighborhood. Nowadays, the urban attractor may be an opportunity to reflect on places of education, such as spaces for interaction and socialization, which strengthen the relationship of reciprocity between the city and health. In New York this relationship has been put into practice by the Active Design Guidelines that promote physical activity thanks to the different conception of spaces, encouraging the use of stairs rather than elevators or escalators. The Roy and Diana Vagelos Education Center by Diller Scofidio+Renfro is conceived as an urban attractor of the Columbia University Campus because the 14-storey tower distributes the spaces integrating the different academic activities of four medical faculties, where students meet in the study-cascade. Columbia University is an urban campus that has extended this open design process northwards, to the intersection of Broadway, 10Th Avenue and the elevated subway tracks, where another urban attractor builds the new gateway to the Baker Athletics Complex: it's Steven Holl's Campbell Sports Center, which houses spaces for sports, study and campus students to meet. These projects help to clarify the notion of attractor, thanks to the coexistence of different activities that characterize the urbanity of complexes conceived, at the beginning, as mono-functional. In this sense the urban attractor is an opera aperta, freed from those physical boundaries that hinder time and space of fruition. The Portuguese example of "Parque Escolar", outlined a system of interventions on the existing heritage of school complexes, taking the spaces of interaction between educational, recreational and sports activities as a field of action of the project. However, these are interventions of design reconfiguration of building complexes that maintain a substantial figurative autonomy with respect to the urban districts to which they belong. The concept of new schools in rural villages or on the outskirts of the world is different. In China, in the Sichuan region, the school of Xiaoquan in Hua Li / TAO's project, whose open and fragmented forms are an integral part of the village, is an attractor for the community as it composes its spatial arrangements and guides its behavior. Beyond the fence and the fear, the school can become a social attractor in the troubled suburbs of Los Angeles where the Ánimo South Los Angeles Charter High School by Brooks+Scarpa, conceives a building with an open courtyard to the city challenging the fear, against the established rule of the school buildings of Los Angeles, that are enclosed in precints duly guarded by security guards. The effectiveness of these experiences makes up an atlas of significant works and a field of investigation into the potential of architectural design in the treatment of the various pathologies of contemporary society, starting with a renewed conception of the shape of buildings and the layout of urban spaces.