Il grattacielo e la città europea

Part of a transformation process that affected the center of The Hague, De Kroon skyscraper, by Rapp + Rapp Architecten, reflects on the ways in which to build the European city, starting from the transformation of its consolidated parts. Significantly termed as ‘European’ by its authors, De Kroon constitute the result of a research aimed at investigating the ways in which tall building can build the city, configuring itself as a ‘skyscraper’ – that is, reaffirming those principles that made it the most authentic product of the American architectural culture and that distinguish it from the ‘towers’ of the Old Continent tradition – and yet express – through its own form - in an intimately ‘European’ dimension. A dimension, this, which leads its authors to seek renewed relationships between skyscraper and the city, and which seems to unfold in the definition of the idea of city underlying the arrangement of tall building in the place that hosts it; of the principles through which skyscraper settles in the city and the relationships established with it; of the form that responds to the essence of the building and the types of space that correspond to it, and finally, of the ways in which the appropriate construction principles can highlight the very reason of the building and its urban character.