Conceptual Parallax

In the contemporary city, the purposeful definition of a specific space has undergone a gradual liquefaction. This process, which dilutes the recognition of the main parts of the city, has made its run side by side with the affirmation of the Maison Dominò and the modern movement. If at the beginning city centers presented a uniform and distinctive building curtain - from which the identity and distinctive regionalism of a typical city stood out clear - nowadays contemporary cities are full of buildings with common features, with façades that do not reveal anything about the peculiarity of the place. The “structure” of this no-place contributed to the progressive dissolution of the clear picture that defined its original identity. The evolution of the concept of Parallax, introduced by Steven Holl in his homonymous book, produced a concept of urban analysis borrowed from astronomical physics and implemented in historical Italian cities. Parallax, developed in Holl’s research during late 1990s and early 2000s, can nowadays be applied with even greater force and made more effective when integrated into screens and loaded with conceptual ideas offered by the “digital city” painted by Matzuda. Therefore, the new city can find new life in the synthesis of the parallaxes and the New York screens. Hyper-media and hyper-technological urban systems can thus become the external extension of the koolhaasian Junk Space; a new city of wadding and contaminated air, getting ready to reflect on its surfaces avatars of desires, projected by those who are passing through.