Rigour and Respect for the Urban Context

In line house for offices and apartments placed in Canosa di Puglia, between Sant'Angelo, B. Brin and Santa Lucia streets. How to consider the project intervention in an urban context which is conditioned by the existence of special buildings that express a significant historic character? To a widespread tendency that considers – in Hegelian manner – his own critic operate of living the contemporaneity as an expression of the ‘being’ as a revelation of his own time – and that therefore proposes a project conforms to the temporal phase in which it manifests itself – a school of thought is contrasted which imagines the designer's critical action through a proactive research field that subordinates authorship in favor of an intentionality conditioned by the constitutive phase of the ‘being’ within which to intervene. It is to this second research field that the project of the in line house for commercial activities, apartments and offices in Canosa di Puglia refers to. Reading reality not as a temporal instant but as a process, that is, as a development that has in itself the law of its unfolding, means pursuing a perspective of transformation with a critical horizon based on the concept of historical continuity and of an organism made up of parts congruently connected to each others. The building corresponds to an urban lot’s headboard of a small-sized block. It attempts to establish a complementary relationship with the surrounding area, especially with the historical "emergencies". The voluntary renunciation to give to the aesthetic readability of the building an exaggerated, as useless, intentionality - exaltation of a parasitic self-referential attitude - derives from the programmatic desire to consider the new intervention only as a "temporary lacuna" of the existing urban fabric. Therefore, the recovery of the autochthonous characters and the adherence to the models of typical behavior of the local constructive tradition have suggested design choices aimed at privileging the "environmental value" with the consequent renunciation of an attitude of solipsistic alienation from the context.