The research of the form in the construction of the contemporary city

The architectural culture of the twentieth century has addressed a very specific theme: the search for a rule of construction of open spaces in the contemporary city, which is identified and shared as was that of enclosed spaces in the pre-nineteenth and nineteenthcentury cities.1 Unfortunately the attempt is still failed, because, as declared by Vittorio Gregotti, the contemporary models and theories have degenerated into the deregulation of the city, where the relationship with open space has been transformed from a structuring element of urban places to dispersion and fragmentation. In particular, this condition has concerned those contemporary realities that are still waiting for rules that are able to discipline the chaotic construction, that’s to say the places of the suburbs, for which seems to be “an authentic renunciation of the possibility of imagining a form [...]; a renunciation of the idea of the relationship between the city and its drawing, which has always been a constant in the history” (Gregotti 2012). It’s true, therefore, that the city is a great artifice of man, defined by Rossi as a “human thing par excellence” (Rossi 1966), which is built on the previous cities and that in expanding continuously it transforms itself modifying both its own forms and the spatiality of the its places, but, with the contemporary city, this character of stratification of places has turned into disorder and has given rise to places lacking their own spatial identity, sometimes discontinuous in form because it hasn’t identity character. To avoid to persist with this attitude that returns the image of a city regulated by spontaneous and uncontrolled processes that don’t admit of any ordering principle, it’s necessary to intervene in the trasformation of the places of the contemporary city through the concept of “elementary part”. It’s evident the need to start again from the project of Architecture that aims to search for form, whose meaning doesn’t end with the fulfillment of a function, but encompasses and surpasses it, acquiring its own autonomy in urban design. So, to restart from the role of form in the contemporary city, where the form is understood in an antithetical sense respect to the functionalist conception, and from its values, it can be an opportunity to build an “open city” in which to reconfigure the preexisting suggesting a new order among the disorder.