Tempo, spazio e mutabilità nella diade durata/temporaneità della forma urbana

Could the dyad of the concepts of duration and temporariness – useful for recognizing the changes in pre-modern architecture, albeit with due caution on a methodological level – still today represent a fertile tool for reading urban transformations and the language that charac terizes the face of the contemporary city? The nourished opinions on the subject open up different interpretative trajectories that leave no room for immediate or intuitive statements. To this end, the essay tries to scrutinize a possible horizon of reasoning centered on the subject/author – reality dialectic (referring, however, to some considerations by the philosopher Nicola Emery), starting from the postulate that duration is not only synonymous with permanence and continuity and temporariness is not an at tribute to be understood exclusively in terms of time. The traditional differences that have character ized the architecture of the two main cultural areas in Europe for a long time are today declining towards an unprecedented and interesting linguistic hybridization that makes the meanings of the two poles of the dyad less selective, which must be re-read with an interpretative key to scrutinize the constitutive part of architectural and urban manifestations, identifying a new cultural identity. As evidence of this interesting “mutation” the sample case of the recent Killesberghöhe district which rises near the well-known Weißenhof built in Stuttgart in 1927 will be analysed.