Opening Up Relations Again Between Form and the World: The City and the ‘Becoming’ of Forms: Design as the Outcome of a Dynamic Figuration

Abstract

There is no single way to define the concept of public space but many ways of materialising, in forms, a place of encounter between people. The idea of public space actually changes from one culture to another. It develops and alters constantly during the life of the forms themselves. None of the methods by which the idea of public space has materialised in a form have ever crystallised into something fixed and unchangeable, supported by eternal laws, but, on the contrary, were always subjected to the influx of time and had to count on it and live in it. Looking at the history of the city, we might say that each public space form that emerged was destined to disappear and make space, in a movement that continuously, dynamically transformed, for the emergence of new forms. Always and constantly at the mercy of chaos, of the precarious, fragile nature of time and death which devours, corrupts and consumes, man is constantly required to ‘refound’ his way of giving shape to the space of encounter between people, in the awareness that no form may ever be definitive. This chapter departs from these preliminary remarks to inquire into the sense of the project for public space in the contemporary city. While acknowledging the continuous ‘becoming’ of the forms through which the idea of public space has been expressed throughout time, the author invites the reader not to feel bewildered by the changes underway.

The idea the author intends to put to the test is that in order to accept the challenges posed by contemporary life, instead of continuing to look at the territory and city, regretting the breakdown of order and beauty that no longer exist, we should try to widen the borders of our view, to see whether it might be possible to find, behind the absurdity of those flows that appear to waver with no destination, fractures and clues, whispering of new spaces of interaction and relations that still today await their expression in forms.