The planned city of La Valletta (Malta)

THE PLANNED CITY OF LA VALLETTA (MALTA) The study that we propose is developed in the Faculty of Architecture of the Polytechnic in Bari in the These Workshop coordinated by Prof. Giuseppe Strappa on: "Analysis and the urban development of the city of Valletta" and describes the reconstruction of the formation process of the city of the Giovanni’s Chivalry. It demonstrates an organic relationship with the territorial structures and, especially, with an atypical relationship with aggregative and housebuildings structures, because of the nature of the planned settlement. One of the most important aim of this study is, particularly, the attempt to verify the validity of the typologic-processual method. It is just verified in the analysis of the urban tissue and the ancient building types, but we will verify this method in the urban planned organisms that in this case is very complex because of the unusual purchaser. In fact, the planned settlement of La Valletta (inserted in the vast panorama of experimentations and abstractions on the ideal city during the XVI century) demonstrates a complex articulation with routes, buildings and main poles (churches, hotels, bunkers, etc.), little hierarchized because of its military and defensive nature. The order of the urban tissue is organized with an orthogonal rigid grid, in which “the auberges” of the different Orders are placed, near the walls, to control and to defence the city threatened of a Turkish invasion. Besides, the investigation on the housing organism has allowed to individualize a few building types in which is possible to know the strong relationship between the residences of the Maltese archipelago and the Sicilian traditional buildings. After the reading, the study will show some design solutions as a result of "ri-designing" process. In this, the city is considered as a temporary moment of the process in continue transformation.