Reading and designing the urban fabric of San Vito Romano

Abstract

Working in a consolidated urban identity involves several considerations and studies regarding the architectural design strategies and the growth behaviour of the urban context itself.

Understanding a local urban identity and its built heritage is of great importance for tackling the objectives of proper reading and designing of the area; then a careful historical, territorial and urban analysis set the basis to start a new project.

Quality of life, commercial vitality and environmental well-being are strictly linked  with the high quality of a specific area's urban character. Considering ourselves as influencers of those transformations, we can observe how urban developments look at directional growing phenomena through the spatial organisation of the parts that form them.

A strategy to properly understand a territorial urban identity consist also in understanding its complex coexistence. We need to consider the area as an integrated complex of nodes and networks, places and flows; in which multiple relations, activities and values co-exist, interact, combine.

The present and final aspect of an urban area is seen as an organic whole of primary elements: human activities and territorial conformation which tells important information about its evolution.

There is a consolidated method of intervention based on the careful reading of the urban fabric to create a final current project; a logical phenomenological analysis is the instrument of understanding the evolution of an area, of its built fabric considering the architectural products of the past so the typological process as the key to use history to create contemporary architectures.

We consider the shape of ancient cities and the path that generates it, we create an urban vocabulary of paths, edges, nodes, districts, and landmarks which has persisted in use in mapping for planning and design. Similarly we apply this study to the different project scales. An approach that considers every new built architecture as part of a complex and live organism.