Lo spazio della rovina. Progetti per l’area del Tempio Dorico a Taranto

Most of our cities date back to an ancient foundation, and their form is the result of a thousand-year stratification. Recent research in ‘urban archaeology’ has allowed a significant advancement in the knowledge of their history, but has also led to some critical conditions relating to the presence of archaeological ruins within the urban space. The ruins reach in these contexts as ‘estranged’ in relation to the urban space, incapable of establishing meaning and form relationships with the place that hosts them. The condition of this places is referable, almost everywhere, to a palimpsest: a place that has had a certain formal interpretation in ancient times and that has seen a succession of other interpretations, at different times. The aim of this study is the identification of possible techniques for the design of the places of archaeology in urban contexts that assume the stratified condition as a ‘value’ for the project itself, aspiring to establish a ‘new’ order among urban parts, reachable through the definition of a renewed dialectical ‘unity’ between them. A significant experimentation field is the city of Taranto, where the Greek city constituted the site of the modern one. Specifically, this study focuses on the area of the so-called Doric Temple, located at the south-eastern end of the island on which the medieval city currently stands, but which had hosted the Greek acropolis in the past. In this area, three composition techniques have been tested for the places of archaeology in the stratified city, which have determined three possible design categories, all united by the intentions to give meaning to the existing ruins through a reflection on their individual value, to determine the possible relationships between these and the city's architecture, to redefine urban form and spaces according to a 'critical' continuity with the existing city.