Typological surveys on the historic city. Actuality of Townhouse

Abstract

After the rediscovery of the historical city by the Italian urban analysis of the fifties and sixties and the following European urban projects of critical reconstruction, it arises a new awareness of the historical city as an artifact built over time and the possibility of its continuity. This recovered temporal condition of consolidated contexts defines the margin within which it is defined the architectural design of urban living, here exemplified through some didactic experiments carried out in two cities (Berlin and Milan). Among the ways of interventions, almost in a surgical manner, emerges on often-unresolved urban sites the thematic confrontation with the urban block and the townhouse, intended as the minimum element of the architecture of the city.