ARC4264 Urban Design

The course focuses of an essential and unavoidable phase of urban design: the urban composition. The étymos (deep meaning of a word) of the Latin term componere - from which the word composition comes - is "to lay with", that is to say to deal with the relations between the parts and the whole in order to obtain, in architectural as well in urban design, the structural harmony of architectural and urban forms.

But, beyond the similarity between architectural and urban composition, there is a fundamental difference due to the fact that architecture and the city don’t have the same temporal rhythm: if architecture is quickly renewed - and contemporary architecture even more than in the past - urban structures have to exist longer; if architectural design can have the purpose of freezing the image of a building, whose destiny is to disappear and to be replaced by another without modifying the context, urban design must have the purpose of setting up a process able to welcome a series of images of successive architectures.

Throughout learning and knowledge of standard elements (street, block, row buildings, big complex, etc.), the instruments variety according to the morphology (topology, geometry, sizing), composition modes (division, addition, multiplication, subtraction, etc.), composition tools, that is intervention modes and use of them (regulating lines, decoupage, occupation traces), and origins and experiences in history (invention of urban patterns, zoning, network), students will acquire the ability to recognize the principles of urban composition that generate and build the urban fabric structure of a city, and to choose  appropriate tools in order to preserve character and identity of existent cities, or to work masterly and correctly on the generation of new urban settlements as urban designer.