Techne. Interdisciplinary Examination for an Integrated Vision. Case Study: the Adriatic City

Abstract

The different forms of environmental determinism (starting with the intuition of Ian McHarg) [1], which accompanied the interpretation of territorial dynamics in the last century, extinguished themselves without the need to refer to Kant’s thoughts regarding “students of nature.” Finally, we are convinced that nature does not design itself, let alone areas originating from a deep complex interaction between natural and anthropic dynamics, such as agrarian landscapes or settlements. On the contrary, it is necessary to develop design interpretations capable of structuring themselves amid the complexity of systematic visions.

When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane, and Torricelli made air support a weight that he knew to be equal to the weight of a known volume of water … a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason only has insight into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that …it must force nature to give answers to questions of reason’s own determining; and must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature’s leading strings; because otherwise our observations, made in obedience to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law… Kant (1787) Preface. In: Critica della ragion pura, Laterza, Rome-Bari