La dimensione intermedia.Gli spazi transitivi, i limiti dell’uso, i confini dialettici

Rational thought interpreted architecture simply as a container for activities, a machine that absorbed energy from within, different separated pieces of a single mechanism. Rational urban planning is thus rooted in Elementarism and the separation of functions. Modern architecture dismantles the rigid relationship between interior space and walls, modern urban planning considered the urban space, releasing it from the ties of dependency that governed the relationship between roads, streets and the constructed block. (…)the traditional compact city, where every part assumed a form in relation to its neighbour, creating squares and urban fabrics, went on dangerously subdividing and breaking up on account of an over simplistic application if the principles of modern urban planning. (cit. Josep Maria Montaner, Sistemas arquitectònicos contemporaneous, Editorial Gustavo Gili, SL, Barcellona, 2008). The additive approach had served to dissolve, or separate the urban space, raising planning to an abstract state which distanced the architect’s attention from the authentic, and conceiving of the city as a mere composition of volumes within the space according to the territorial scale, where the space of the lived-in area was an almost discounted consequence, perhaps substituting the notion of neutral space to that of place. The heated argument since the post-World War II period, which resulted in an affirmation of the crisis at the CIAM 9, refocuses attention on the idea of habitat as a system of spaces, an articulation of the private, the public and the semi-public; connected to spaces by the limits created by flexibility of use, by unclear borders, by complex extensions. The habitat is a system only inasmuch as it is a union of heterogeneous elements on a different scale which are inter-related according to an internal organization which results in the strategic adaptation to the complexity of the context and which creates, or builds a whole which can’t be explained by the sum of its parts. There are no isolated objects within, but all the elements are assimilated and melt into the fabric; every part is present and acts according to a role and in continuity with the others. The house is a “half-open, half-closed ” being, a continuous threshold, a space that is in transition in which exchanges take place and a labyrinthine style complexity appears. A topological labyrinth, the place for living is thus an individual organization wherein the dweller appropriates the space. The logical progression of this phenomenological concept of the house leads us to the relationship between public and private where we find a scaled reproduction mechanism which from the microcosm of the variety of the house Abstract recalls genuine and authentic planning models. This is what the architects at CIAM at Dubrovnik (’56) meant when they sparked polemics by comparing the vitality of the Kasbah with its labyrinthine spatial organization to the purity of modern prismically-limited visions. The Kasbah, its traditional fabric, the rural villages of the Mediterranean demonstrate the imprecision and mingling of limits and functions, the compact nature and continuity of the mass of blocks of houses that surrounds and combines spaces of different types and creates relationships of osmotic permeability, density and porosity in complicated ways. In Modern architecture, the urban matrix experiments with a radical transformation in which one passes from a constructed fabric which functions as a continuous solid, in which open spaces appear as sculpted figures extracted from a mouldable mass, to a creation based on isolated convex, which generate a continuous void, in which the open space ceases to have a precise form and which instead becomes a background, while the role of the figure or shape is taken over by buildings that appear as isolated fragments. Therefore we are faced with a radical topological transformation of the urban space. The lesson of the traditional fabrics and their systematic clarity, their irrational components that are in a certain way spontaneous in defining dimensions, proportions and filters, is revealed as a determining factor in offering consolidated solutions entirely appropriate to everyday needs and functions. From a rationalistic approach which breaks down into clearly defined and juxtaposed sections and elements, one passes towards a more intuitive approach (phenomenological) which interprets and reads in the mixture of the system (that is, within the compact and solid system of the settlement) those elements that go to make it up and which express it even though there is no sense or solution of continuity. The Kasbah - whose continuous evolution derives from no rational control or logic in any way - is a compact system, a porous mass, an organism made up of penetrating micro-systems, transits and stasis. It is an authentic machine for living, where the term machine is meant in its widest sense as an organized and perfectly functioning unit. If within the Athens Charter a clear call was made for the definition of clearly defined spaces in terms of limits and functions, the position of Team 10 underlines imprecision as the added value of space and place. A concept of new and radical space is thus defined, the threshold, a spatiality of intermediate scale which becomes enriched through the possibility of usage, of personalization and colonization by virtue of its “middle space” nature, its functional vagueness, its measured yet informal character, by its encircling and deceiving urban dimension. Thresholds are the spaces that regulate the permeability of compact and dense fabrics, they are identifiable where urban solidity opens itself up to possibilities of penetration, where the pores of the building become shadowy places favourable to the dialectic stasis between individual and collective; where the characteristics of the semi-closed, half-closed and filtered spaces create relational balances, dynamics of controlled sharing, discreet dialogues with that which is outside the private family microcosm. The threshold is the structure of space that regulates the dialogue with the rest (the complex) and itself becomes a place for living, a spatial device at the centre of the family background and a hinge between individual and collective. An intermediate space, a void for transition and meeting. The threshold is an imprecise limit, it is a space marked out for use, from the private fixtures, an expressed yet empty area; it is a third party that is neither private nor public, it has an in-between nature. Once again the Smithsons state that architectural reflection should start from the smallest scale, which means starting from the relationship between house and street, home and road, and thus this research is aimed at reflecting on the architectural and urban devices which make up the basis of this relationship. With the intervention of Team X it is now clear that living is not a fact confined to an apartment or dwelling, a private and individual space, but that it is exactly that by virtue of its extension and presence within the urban context, its links with public spaces. A reading of urban fabrics, and the Kasbahs in particular as organized systems reveals them as design tools in the conception of places for living not as individual architectural facts, building events in which the exclusive nature of the house and its external projections are detailed, but as systems for and of places, environments, objects that on different scales articulate the context of the habitat.