Big unitary buildings for housing. Reasons for the project of the collective space

Today's necessity to speak about the relationship between architecture and ideology depends on the progressive leaving of the architectural discipline from its necessary operative reasons: the idea and the form. This progressive leaving has provoked that the collective value of the architecture degenerates into a communicative vehicle and into a purely aesthetic result, and has provoked also the degeneration of the individual sphere, which is intended only as a private interest. Such degenerations flow in the fall of the collective sense of the city within the individual and collective sphere necessarily coexist, giving themselves a reason through the identification and the denomination of a selected place and the peculiar values that it communicates. The return of the interest towards the ideology marks the possibility to rejoin the two necessary operative reasons through their mutual neutralization process and to bring the discourse on the architecture as collective art. It condenses the creative act and the reference to permanent and recognizable systems. Ideology as the foundation of the collective character of the architecture also effectively counteracts the dispersion process of the contemporary metropolis, and accepts the real reasons of the settlements. The big unitary buildings for housing are considered as the immediate translation of the contrast between the basic need of living and the basic need of sociality; this contrast takes the limit‐value between urban scale and architectural scale, that fixes three different levels of reading. The first one focuses on the relation of the internal character of the building; the second one investigates the theme of the limit scale of the building compared to the city; the third one considers the building in its complexity, in order to determine an image of “city in the city” or “other city”, or rather as formal representations of ideas aimed at improvement of living. This considerations about the great urban artifact for housing leads to an image – or a metaproject that could be considered a representation of an idea about the relationship between collective housing and the city – the urban monastery.