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W HAT_INsubstance

: number two :
Lectio magistralis: the rhythms of the contemporary city  

It is not so much necessary to make the machine of the world work, as much as to stage the meanings of it, to introduce meaning. Quoting Aldo Rossi, we wonder about the role of the architect in the contemporary world and of architecture that must have the ability to develop an idea of the city, absent in this time.

A set of transformations that are difficult to live in, insensitive to the knowledge of architecture, which have remained on the edge of mutations. The necessary incisiveness was lacking, says professor Pepe Barbieri, while the images of the works carried out in the various years under his guidance scroll on the screen, in a continuous and constant research on the themes of "Recycling and environmental infrastructures", with the will to look to the future, to the necessary perspectives. But with what idea of the city?

A definition of Geocity is pursued, based on an ambiguity that finds its richness in the double interpretation of the term, on the one hand looking at the city founded on the Earth, as an immense infrastructure and on the other hand, at the world that becomes a city, which is it consists of a thousand different filaments and rhythms around the positions of the various settlements.

The city understood as an amalgam of natural and artificial and material elements, of porous and fibrous flows at the same time, with thickened and solid areas, full of memory and vast areas full of quality, almost liquid, made of antithetical elements that have dissolved the link with the traditionalist vision between natural and artificial. What Heidegger called the task of the work of art: to re-establish an opening to the world. A hybrid universe in which we are called to move with the task of attributing meanings.

The description of the landscape that we used to read gets lost, as the object is gradually replacing the image that the metropolis has today. The landscape and the metropolis no longer find distinction in their condition of continuity and this Rosseau already anticipated in the eighteenth century, referring to an example as clear to him as Switzerland was, now extended to become a single large agglomeration.

The reason for nature itself changes, becoming an active and internal part of the city and the sense of space and time are enormously expanded. Monet shows a possible relationship between the world of artifice and the natural one, breaking the boundary and distance, building a garden and entering it, breaking the frame and bringing back an identity between representation and action.

There is a crisis in the space-time binomial, as a shared paradigm, a widely explored theme that leads to a certain disinterest in the future that cannot be explored and thought as a whole. A disaffection due to these reasons that leads to living spaces in an inattentive and negligent way, for this reason the immaterial space becomes the place of social integration, overcoming the material space and upsetting the usual conception of time.

Farinelli recalls that the shape of time changes from the moment in which the Renaissance man is placed at the center of the perspective, and to just enjoy the perspective he must remain still as if paralyzed. Then in the Baroque this movement exists according to a progressive logic almost like a Beethovenian escape, a logic from which we are strangers because perhaps contemporaneity does not mean staying at the same time but putting together many different times.

A time made up of fragments and lived by a metropolitan inhabitant with new imaginaries, a “biomolteplice” inhabitant, who lives many different realities that ask to be resolved through certain forms of architecture.

Do we really recognize the community that inhabits these spaces? And is this society really having a common time by sharing spaces consciously? Unfortunately not, because the contemporary project has focused more on understanding things and on the ways of intervening on them than on the life of men.

In this scenario, the role of the architect must be activated in the search for connections between a whole and the single element that goes to inhabit that system, in a direction of variations and invariants. Yes, there is a complexity, but it refers to its functioning, to the metabolism.

Man is the unit of greatness of his house and this should be the case for all things that concern him. The city itself, which in ancient times based its blocks on a defined number of steps, today must build its steps on those of contemporary man, who is necessarily different from the one that preceded it. Professor Rosario Pavia mentions the words of an anthropologist who sees walking as an exceptional and unique act, in which the body, step by step, totters on the brink of catastrophe, because the only thing that prevents the human being from falling it is the rhythmic movement, first on one leg and then on the other. Our body moves in space following its own center of gravity, in dynamic equilibrium, making the axis of gravitation always fall on a support base, a mobile support. In walking we perceive the force that attracts us to the ground. The soil reaffirms its fundamental position, reservoir of material substance and source of life of the immaterial one, a figure that welcomes the city of the world.

In this situation of crisis, if universities are not the places where an idea of the future is produced, they ethically stop their task. At all costs, at all levels, a high degree of imagination of the future is required of us. To work tomorrow in this perspective of Geocittà, as a hospitable city, a reading by Bauman that recalls Kant.

“If the world is really a globe, there is nothing to be done, gradually it will all be inhabited because as an excursion of truly uninhabitable things everyone will find a place on this world in an increasing way; and living on this world globe means that we could never move away from each other, so much so that we do not meet someone else who is close to us, because we are on a sphere. And therefore, the unification of the human species into a single citizenship, civitas, is the destination that nature itself has chosen for us, the ultimate horizon of our universal history. Stimulated and guided by reason and our interest in self-preservation, we are destined to pursue this horizon and in the fullness of time to reach it. Sooner or later, there will be no free space left of which those of us who find the already populated places too limited too uncomfortable cluttered or uncomfortable can venture and therefore nature requires us to consider hospitality as the supreme precept that we all must sooner or later embrace equally as we must seek a solution to the long chain of trial and error, to the catastrophes our mistakes have caused, to the ruins these catastrophes have left behind. "

W02 ° T'NV "

Cartography

The geological and geothematic cartography constitutes a fundamental step for the knowledge of the territory, as a strategic and introductory element to the planning and management activities of the soil and subsoil.
The geological map represents the basis for further cartographic elaborations, called geothematic cartographies. Therefore this charter constitutes the fundamental prerequisite for any intervention aimed both at soil defense, territorial planning and the forecasting and prevention of natural risks, as well as the design of works and infrastructures. Through the survey activities and detailed studies, a set of data is acquired which, through a reasoned synthesis, are then represented on paper with appropriate colors, graphics and symbols. Together with the legend and accompanying diagrams, a geological map offers a general overview of the geology of the area, providing information on: 1) the lithology (composition, texture, structure), fossiliferous and mineralogical content, age, genesis and method of placing instead of rocks; 2) geometric relationships (stratigraphic and tectonic) of the rocky bodies.

Geothematic cartography, on the other hand, represents the development and deepening of the basic geological cartography in specific fields, with the aim of providing further information for the knowledge of the general conditions of risk and vulnerability of the territory. I want to list some examples:

- The geomorphological cartography, which represents the forms of accumulation and erosion of the relief, depicts the morphographic and morphometric characters; it allows to interpret the origin as a function of geomorphic, endogenous and exogenous processes and identifies their chronological sequence, with particular distinction between active and inactive forms.

- hydrogeological cartography, represents the main hydrogeological information existing on a given territory. The purpose of a hydrogeological map is to provide information on the characteristics and typology of the aquifers, hydrogeological units and information on the aquifers and their hydrogeological relationships.

To understand the importance of cartography as a basic element in the study and approach to geology, I wanted to ask Professor G. Rusciadelli, professor of stratigraphic geology, what he thought about it:

Basically, a geological map is the representation of geological bodies, their limits and their shapes. It represents the basis of any type of survey on the territory, therefore it is the basic tool for geological knowledge. It is the need linked to our need to visualize, elaborate and communicate what are the characteristics of rocky bodies ".

W02 ° T'MF "

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