Città e forma della terra

The theme of this brief reflection concerns the relationship between the architecture of the city and the earth’s form. An intense relationship that has regulated the theoretical and practical thinking of the urban phenomenon and that has defined a field of study, the science of the city, with its principles, theories and operational developments. Attention is paid to the organic and inseparable role that the earth’s form, topography and geology assume as natural elements in the design and conformative process of the city’s architecture. The earth’s form represents the material component that introduces the construction of the city, and in particular of the ancient city, whose morphological and geological nature constitutes the ordering act of erecting, of doing in a constructive sense. The action of founding requires technical skill, compositional sensitivity, a representative strategy: the need to orient, adjust, correct, match, with geometric precision, modeling, by subtraction and addition, the earth, giving shape and space to matter. Is it only a feeling of nostalgia for the ancient city, for its clarity, measure, its natural process of continuous adjustments and the search for continuity (between persistence and mutation) to move these reflections? The interest that drives me towards the study of the territory, of the city, of its formation, of the relationship between topography and urban morphology, represents a cultural position that still looks confidently at the reconstruction of a conscious and responsible training of the architect, of a disciplinary awareness based on the strength of history and the orientation produced by experience, by the continuous confrontation with the events of the past.