Spatial forms for associated living regard different forms of being for the urban organism depending on the necessity. However, considering that space and the conceptual identity of a city is a perennially fluid and changing condition (both as a reflex of the dynamic condition of the society circumscribed within its margins, as well as its concrete or induced needs, behavioural models, cultural objectives and choices in a social, political and economic sense), its specific character can be found in a state of continuous redefinition. After that, it requires that designers, in their work, have a clear perception of current reality to respond adequately to the issues and the questions that reality poses on a daily basis.
The modernist tradition has individuated three forms of being for urban structure, three canonical forms for acting and operating within it that are: living, working and resting (and today we can add consuming). This functional distinction, which is rigid and pragmatic in itself, is essentially aimed at answering the organizational needs in areas of the constructed city and those in expansion.
CIAM, as an international meeting place, became an important occasion to compare and periodically exchange ideas and experiences. In the fifties, and in any case during the crucial phase of post-war construction, that organization of cultural gathering ceased after a general crisis of ideas and ideals concerning the search for city and its perfect form of being. All of this was discovered by a young and composite group of architects. Team X sought to carry the question of living forward with a different sort of logic than the modernist idea of standardization, spotlighting the user and his dwelling in a social dimension.
With nearly fifty years having passed since that phase of reflection and experimentation, certain themes proposed by Team X (whose ideas and design elaborations have had episodic concrete possibilities to be seen and realized) are finding, in the current crisis, new attention from architectural culture, which considers “modern” as its own past.
Though today’s society has profoundly changed with respect to the post-war period, there is still an unresolved condition of urban development or of not having adequately perceived the current concrete necessities for living. Truly, the question seems to be aggravated enormously by not having found the proper control instruments for directing, in a more balanced way, the devastating effects of the development of the construction industry (which advances in the absence of a proper dialogue between natural landscape and artificial landscape) and which brings about a worrisome densification of urban areas: as was highlighted with a fine strategy of communication at the 10th International Architecture Biennial in Venice in 2006 entitled Cities: architecture and society, by Richard Burdett.
It is in any case necessary to carry out a profound general rethinking of strategy in the residential construction sector (with undirected practices that seem to be consolidated, mostly due to weak control actions). It should be rethought with regard to the relationships between residential structures and their users, as well as instruments of definition, measure and conformance to the growth of the city, historically belonging to modernist schools of thought (such as: organization of urban space rigidly regulated by indexes of quantity/quality, type, minimum-existence and others).
All said, the idea of city seems to exist less, having been substituted by labyrinth-styled configurations of settlements or by enclaves that are closed to the physical realities that surround them. Architecture seems to have lost the ability to carry on a concrete dialogue with the society it should be mirroring, aiming instead at a relationship that is completely founded on emotional impact or amazement, wonder, discomfort and disorientation, all trying to grab the collective attention which seems increasingly more rarefied.
The city, or that which represents the combination of historical nucleus and disseminated expansion, as Paul Virilio affirms in City of Panic, (though literature on the new urban condition is abundant and varied) is also a place of danger and of non-living together (as is the case, in some dramatic ways for the banlieue in Paris). However, that danger does not only come from the difficulty of social and inter-personal relationships, it also comes from the "dredges" of civilization or the multiple forms of hyper-consumerism, which in turn can lead to deprivation: of water, of air, of space, of the territory, of the landscape, of beauty and even of nature itself, which living may not renounce.
The modernist tradition has individuated three forms of being for urban structure, three canonical forms for acting and operating within it that are: living, working and resting (and today we can add consuming). This functional distinction, which is rigid and pragmatic in itself, is essentially aimed at answering the organizational needs in areas of the constructed city and those in expansion.
CIAM, as an international meeting place, became an important occasion to compare and periodically exchange ideas and experiences. In the fifties, and in any case during the crucial phase of post-war construction, that organization of cultural gathering ceased after a general crisis of ideas and ideals concerning the search for city and its perfect form of being. All of this was discovered by a young and composite group of architects. Team X sought to carry the question of living forward with a different sort of logic than the modernist idea of standardization, spotlighting the user and his dwelling in a social dimension.
With nearly fifty years having passed since that phase of reflection and experimentation, certain themes proposed by Team X (whose ideas and design elaborations have had episodic concrete possibilities to be seen and realized) are finding, in the current crisis, new attention from architectural culture, which considers “modern” as its own past.
Though today’s society has profoundly changed with respect to the post-war period, there is still an unresolved condition of urban development or of not having adequately perceived the current concrete necessities for living. Truly, the question seems to be aggravated enormously by not having found the proper control instruments for directing, in a more balanced way, the devastating effects of the development of the construction industry (which advances in the absence of a proper dialogue between natural landscape and artificial landscape) and which brings about a worrisome densification of urban areas: as was highlighted with a fine strategy of communication at the 10th International Architecture Biennial in Venice in 2006 entitled Cities: architecture and society, by Richard Burdett.
It is in any case necessary to carry out a profound general rethinking of strategy in the residential construction sector (with undirected practices that seem to be consolidated, mostly due to weak control actions). It should be rethought with regard to the relationships between residential structures and their users, as well as instruments of definition, measure and conformance to the growth of the city, historically belonging to modernist schools of thought (such as: organization of urban space rigidly regulated by indexes of quantity/quality, type, minimum-existence and others).
All said, the idea of city seems to exist less, having been substituted by labyrinth-styled configurations of settlements or by enclaves that are closed to the physical realities that surround them. Architecture seems to have lost the ability to carry on a concrete dialogue with the society it should be mirroring, aiming instead at a relationship that is completely founded on emotional impact or amazement, wonder, discomfort and disorientation, all trying to grab the collective attention which seems increasingly more rarefied.
The city, or that which represents the combination of historical nucleus and disseminated expansion, as Paul Virilio affirms in City of Panic, (though literature on the new urban condition is abundant and varied) is also a place of danger and of non-living together (as is the case, in some dramatic ways for the banlieue in Paris). However, that danger does not only come from the difficulty of social and inter-personal relationships, it also comes from the "dredges" of civilization or the multiple forms of hyper-consumerism, which in turn can lead to deprivation: of water, of air, of space, of the territory, of the landscape, of beauty and even of nature itself, which living may not renounce.
