Costruzione e interpretazione di un’idea di ‘città-natura’. La lezione di Stoccarda

The article deals with the theme of the continuity of the development of the European city, a continuity historically pursued through coherence with an idea of the city and the characters of the place, undermined by contemporary expansion processes. The topic is tackled by critically interpreting the historical development of the city of Stuttgart, from its foundation to the present day, up to the great expansion project “Stuttgart 21”, which affects the area of the Hauptbahnhof of Paul Bonatz and undermines the urban form. Despite its ‘territorial’ dimension, the city of Stuttgart has an intelligible urban structure, which is the expression of a coherent and significant relationship with the physical form of the place and its topological characters. A structure that, perhaps for this reason, has been preserved over time despite the heavy war destruction and subsequent reconstructions. Its current form, apparently disordered like that of many big contemporary cities, manifests a settlement idea based on a conscious relationship with ‘nature’, an idea that has been built, pursued and interpreted over time both through the construction of single buildings and the planning of entire urban parts. This idea seems to be in line with the conformation of the German city - and the northern European city in general - which constitutively provides for the presence of large spaces of nature within the city, maintained in their natural form and considered as places of relationship in the same way as the traditional urban spaces (squares and avenues). A significant interpretation of this urban structure seems to be precisely the relationship with the geography of the place conceived as a natural syntactic structure capable of suggesting settlement principles, directions, arrangements, measures and limits and, as such, capable of explaining the reasons for the constitutive settlement choices in the process of defining the built form of the city and the character of its spaces. The “Stuttgart 21” project seems to ‘betray’ the urban structure of the city, characterized by this tension with the natural forms of the place and always based on the recognition of their topological value as well as on their interpretation through the forms of architecture. Starting from the knowledge of the form of the consolidated city, the essay tries to understand and critically describes the reasons.