The geographic square: a public space in the territory

Abstract

Although city architecture has always been conditioned by factors outside architecture itself, it has always been considered from within its own subject area. Today architecture is seen as subsidiary to other branches of knowledge, and, despite its exuberant forms, it retains an illusory autonomy, confined by assumptions that surpass and depreciate it. Contemporary architecture must reclaim the notion of perpetuity and permanence, so as to create new memories and contribute to the maintenance of collective references that solidify our current history’s forms and the forms of a growing city increasingly difficult to identify.

The geographic square’, as an architectural system and as a fundamental element in the contemporary city’s form, may pose a new the (periodically re-assessed) issue concerning the relation between two project practices which have been kept strategically separate: territorial planning and architectural intervention.