Imago Urbis: project approaches in urban landscaping

Reflections drawn from Elizabethan theatre in Gdansk, Renato Rizzi’s Poland (2004-2014)

Abstract

The problem to approach when dealing with the architectural project is that of the urban landscape. It has to do with the failure to read unmistakably not only the signs that make it historic but also those that refer to an original nature. In fact, both landscape in a general sense and the city in a particular one constitute the privileged setting for place memory which, in turn, entails collective memory. In this respect, we can ascertain that the most important formal invention produced by the associative human life is the city. It has always been the fundamental collective artifice that man has conceived to recognize himself as part of a community.
Consequently, studying, understanding and interpreting the aesthetic and formal means by which a community has represented itself over time through urban artifices, implies the disciplinary study of the reasons and foundations that give raise to the specific association among individuals.
The city has become an artificial landscape: the original pesca meravigliosa site (city, territory and landscape) has now become the privileged space for a scientific- technical design that has paralyzed the future in an all-embracing vision. Recognizing the elusive character of present cities and landscapes should produce a project able to reinvent itself in its educational aspects whenever it takes part in the construction of the imago urbis.