That this is not an easy time for young workers, including for young designers, but is to be said for young people in general, is a matter of fact, today, as often other times I have a little 'to escape the monotony of work, a little' to recharge the batteries and a little 'search for solutions to two projects I'm working with some architect friends have returned to a village in the canton of Ticino, Monte Carasso, who had accidentally discovered a year and a half ago and then I had occasion recently to study.
Monte Carasso is a small town south of Bellinzona of 2400 inhabitants, more or less like the town where I live. It was a typical village in Ticino, made of rustic houses, arranged almost randomly along the main road, an extension of more or less unregulated, as our country and a center with a church and what remains of an ancient monastery.
the late 70's had just approved a plan that called for the construction of a school close to the motorway, while the area center near the former convent was part of a rebuilding program. The new administration took office just thought instead to disavow that plan to enter the new school right in the former convent. In 1978 he was called, with a mandate to recover the old convent and to design the new school, the architect Luigi Snozzi. For Snozzi was a concrete opportunity to try to reinvent the center of the country. The monumental area with the cloister and the church could not be read and what was missing in Monte Carasso were public spaces, play spaces, ie spaces for young people and families. Snozzi proposed to enhance the monumental complex of the former convent bring to light the ancient arches, demolishing houses, cleaning the entire system and especially by a major operation to empty the center of the monumental superfettazioni. Church, school, cemetery, home of the municipality, municipal gym suddenly found themselves to be part of a new project, a project that aimed to build the public center of the city, made a new agora of open spaces and places to stay, play and leisure time.
After approval of the policy principles set out in the draft Snozzi, it poses the problem of defining the new planning instruments which were to replace the floor, the notorious technical standards and building regulations.
First was a plan detail to the "zone of protection of the monuments", which provided new alignments and in fact at that point aside the plan. It was designed a new town planning legislation, extended to the nuclei of the old town area surrounding the monument, which was limited to a few rules, leaving the problems are usually addressed in local standards, volumes, distances from boundaries, etc., to the goodness of projects and very few rules. This new legislation places some constraints and given great power to a committee of architects, was in fact designed to offer great freedom, especially settlement. A major issue was densify the city center, giving the possibility that to construct small buildings next to existing buildings and limiting the consumption of the peripheral ground. Monte Carasso suddenly became an example of a city where the project replaced the floor, or rather one of those instances where the plan was just rebuilt from a project and not vice versa, as usually happens. Monte Carasso became an example of how a redevelopment project of a monumental center could become a true city project.
This reduction of the rules did not mean unbridled deregulation and lax and without a parachute out of control: in fact, a review carried out by the planning commission, made up of prominent people, because central construction of the city, and surveyors of the country (with all due respect to the latter), was a great and important. Only five years later, in 1990 approved the new plan, the rules built from field-testing of approved projects in those years.
While normally the rule is applied to urban planning with absolute rigidity, requiring the project to adapt to the strict rules as abstract, often indifferent to the proper places and architectural project in the planning process started in Monte Carasso was thus granted to the highest architectural freedom of infringement, provided that this transgression was justified as actually qualifying.
Today, Monte Carasso has a monumental center open, airy, light and lively and made a historic center of old houses flanked by modern buildings, and I think Monte Carasso can still be regarded as a model for our poor and ill-reduced villages. An example in the planning and design just did not go hand in hand, but rather a simple project, so to speak, for an old center has been converted into an idea of \u200b\u200bthe city, rejecting the abstract planning of the planning rules, understood as of the word, and pulling the schedule later. Monte Carasso is still a model to study, to see, to live.
0 comments:
Post a Comment