The crisis of the relationship between structure and form as crisis of the city

The shape (the form) resists over time only if it is the ultimate aspect, the compositional and visible product, of a structure with transmissible and readable architectural grammar in its internal relationships. History has given us within the built reality, monuments that allow us to understand the inseparable relationship between form and structure in which the latter assumes the role of “making intelligible, through a process of progressive abstraction, a heterogeneous and complex reality, which manifests itself in the sign of fragmentation” (Arìs 2006): starting from the concept of “ruderization” and spolium as spontaneous temporal operations or critically induced on the architectural object, which reveals its underlying structure, its resistant substrate, yes they will analyze some architectures or urban fabrics whose form has been influenced by the invariants of the existing structure or by its resilient character. Structure that through its characteristics of seriality and rhythmicity has characterized the linear systems of territorial scale as that of the aqueduct of the city of Evora in Portugal or wrapping on itself in the archetypal structure of the enclosure has led to a metamorphic architecture like the cathedral of Syracuse. The consolidated historic city grows, and organizes itself through a stratification of structures and forms dependent on each other: the Greco-Roman area is thus the place of permanence in which urban forms have settled, in each scalar dimension, on resilient structure systems. The contemporary city, instead, a mirror of the mass media society and of immediate communication, has moved towards a formalist drift and has forgotten the relationship between the structure inherited from history and its role as an “educator” of the project. All too often, everything is a phenomenon, rapid and consumable, and the forms of architecture are no longer rooted in the structure of the city, becoming only images of a possible reality. The contribution goes on to specify that the variation, the difference between one form and another, nowadays sought obsessively, in the consolidated city has always been transmitted by its structure and by the interaction between what a previous form bequeathed to the subsequent form, or its matrix characteristics and its structure in the meaning of type: the type is itself a structure that orients the form and its infinite variations. The variation is similar to the deformation of a past form sedimented in the collective memory of a cultural area.