New Architectural-Urban Rooms

The fast infrastructural and physical changes that have taken place in most contemporary cities after the industrial and post industrial era have frequently implied the lack of continuity between new architectural and urban parts and their context. This problem was already evident in the 50’s, when the rational urban model was strongly criticized by Team 10 for being an austere and abstract model that simplifies the urban and architectural problems creating parts of the city which are zoned, insensitive and in discontinuity with the place. The request for a specificity that the architectural project must have with the context, specificity sometimes interpreted as regionalism, historicism, or the development of complexity and pluralism, will enrich the architectural research for a new kind of urbanity. Here begins the tendency which began in the 50s and 60s to look for new contents and expressions in the architectural project, as well as for new meanings that go beyond the project’s function and physical sign in the territory, to develop new types of urban orders. In fact, it is possible to talk about the development of a project at an 'urban scale' only when, in the development of a project, the connotations of scale and functional relationships are wider with respect to those usually present in the architectural object. The term ‘urban scale’ is aimed to define an architectural or urban proposal that, with new kind of spaces, connections, paths, activities, not only goes beyond the ‘boundaries’ of the development to influence a larger urban territory, but also accepts that the city enters inside the same to develop new types of ‘urban rooms’.