"Imparare dalla strada: strategie e atlanti"

There are urban or landscape situations in which the relationship of the new architecture with the existing context can not be exhausted in a pure interaction with the characters of the morphology of the site. These places are often marginal or interstitial compared to morphological dominant tissues of the city or territory, places where the stratification of signs caused by history has often confused and hybridized the lines of force of a possible clear formal structure of foundation and support for the project. In such places the reinvention of a founding structure requires a procedure of re-signification of the system of relations on a large scale and the construction of new land-marks, new strongholds or reference points capable of tracking long distance relationships with facts (urban or landscape) distant, but stronger in defining a formal structure of reference. New landmarks, but not new monuments, because the peremptory "exhorting" security of the monument is something that does not belong to us anymore: rather allusive signs, often hybrid, which bear the marks of a dialogue by differences that characterizes our age, devoid as it is of incontrovertible and universal formal and figurative codes; architectures that connote relations, or on the contrary that derive their forms from the same relations or from the interlace of them. Faced with the growing disarticulation of metropolitan areas the conventional design tools have long pointed out their inefficiency, especially where they presuppose a unifying control of facts that actually base their raison d'être on important elements of uncertainty and unpredictability. The suburbia are one of the areas in which the crisis of architectural thought shows deeper, but also where the close contact with the multiple demands coming from the conditions of the contemporary world opens up a wide field of possibilities to experiment with new techniques of intervention wishing to compete with the big scale.