New urban figurations

The new urban figurations significantly represent a way through which young architects (students and graduates) of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florence face the design and the project in tight continuity with the experiences of the Radical Architecture of the Seventies, establishing connections and languages with contemporary art movements. Research provides the opportunity for learning and debating the topics of contemporary architectural culture, with a special reference to the more experimental and innovative trends with the purpose of maturing an articulate and coherent design method that develops a personal and expressive architectural “design” which is then verified at the urban scale. The capacity to use the available data and tools (design materials: the values of the place – historical, morphological, urban and technical-functional data) is highlighted, with the aim of proposing solutions and usages that are “different” from the usual. An expressive capacity and an imaginative capacity; but mostly the capacity to find “alternative” solutions. The capacity, that is, of “erring”, of “jumping” over the consolidated rules – almost a sort of evolutionary mutation – with the purpose of proposing usages, behaviours and forms that present and represent the will to innovate, to overcome the current situation in order to acquire new meanings.

The topics addressed are:
Contextuality and the “metropolitan” language. The project will find in the context of the place the structural matrices for its own compositive configuration, through a process of analysis of the environmental surroundings and of synthesis of its most significant values, with the aim of establishing its inherent logic. It also finds, in the reference to “cultural places” represented by the most current and international, more “metropolitan” movements and uses, those which cross the borders of place, the matrices, the affinities and consonances that are more related to a qualitative linguistic structuring that is capable to affirm the wholeness of its own contemporary nature.
The project as “urban archetype”. The project must tend to evoke and recreate, within the architectural dimension, the meanings and structures of the “urban archetype”: affirming itself “beyond” the functionalist reasons it must express itself as “desire for spaces with a strong urban connotation”, and therefore with an intense emotional charge, as imagining complex spatial systems, combined at a variety of scales. The research will therefore be necessary for a strict consequentiality between URBAN DESIGN and ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN and for a new and close relationship between urban planning and architecture which, overcoming with alternatives the concepts of urban lot and building type, presupposes on the contrary the proposal for a new “URBANITY” for the contemporary city.