Vegetable chromosomes
This portion of city is considered peripheral space in its location and, in the same instant, place defined by its being, or urban space, an informal quadrilateral between the city and the country. It is characterized by vertical presences, tall pylons (support structures for the city's electrical lines) that make up the visual appeal for the observer. The land appears fractioned into parts of city and small crops in this horizontal plane, a portion of the vastest Pistoian plain, the horizon line. The nurseries try to produce hints of order in the land. Modest structures rise up among the pylons and nurseries. They are a summary of a legacy of rural past and improbable desires of the same improbable urban expansions. Like temptation on the threshold. To find oneself at the periphery of the old city becomes a possibility of union, a necessary search to connect oneself to it. The Santa Barbara fortress is therefore an appeal, structures and pylons like inadequate existing responses. Vertigo in the city. There is, then, a necessity to overcome this tempting threshold, making use in the act of structures surely capable of that necessity. This temptation leads to respect for the place and to the contemporary need to exceed it, to adapt it in order to redefine it. The threshold, that limit, a negotiable confine, between one place and another, in our space between the city of the third circle and the semi-urban space, rural of the peripheral; we will call that place periurban space. It will involve, therefore, turning to the reality of the periurban territories that develop through the fragmentation of the space-rural territory in order to determine new realities and socio-economic practices.
The urban country, the periphery of motorway junctions, inevitably becomes space to re-invent and therefore to re-invest. An often-recurring difficulty exists for this type of place concerning its definition, often taking the analyses toward complicated searches for attribution, for example, of the necessary administrative competences. There is a sensation of being inside peripheral spaces of the city in an abandoned state, places approaching the non-place. Freeing ourselves from the mythological being of the true place, the possibility is affirmed that this space of urban periphery can become place. Even better, it is not an absolute but our true place in the gauge where we recognize our condition. Therefore, there will be a territory to negotiate, to explore, to interrogate, if one wishes to fulfill the promise of reviving the presence, of giving back life, breath, and thought to what is turned off, immobile, closed today. To define a new portion of the landscape where one happens to be surprised by its substantiality, by its fullness, by its promise. Yves Bonnefroy has us travel through the experience of this becoming in his work on The Inland knowing that place would be nothing if it hadn't been born from the renowned, experienced being in every instant. It is therefore an ideal within reach of the world. In this space of the city, between city and country, one must inevitably have to relate to a landscape as the first action of planning reference. We remember to build as to cultivate, citing Cattaneo. The German language uses the same word for the art of building and the art of constructing, so the noun farmer doesn't seem like cultivation but construction, Ackerbau, and that, therefore, the share-cropper is a builder Bauer: A population must build its fields like a city. We also know that the ancient German term buan means to live in but, at the same time, designates the act of circumscribing, taking care of and, above all, cultivating a field, a vineyard.
To live in is the occupation through which man attains existence, leaving the things around himself arranged, putting down his roots. The mortals live in when they save the earth. The most important thing then, citing what Aldo Rossi reminds us in his invaluable Scientific autobiography, is the attempt to try and point out that construction, architecture are the primary elements in which life is engaged. Life and sustainability of the territory become the cornerstones of this project. The high percentage of green, 90%, is distributed in its expansion on all of the intervention area. We would no longer have an 1800s-style traditional fenced garden or public park, rather an entire urban area that adopts the value of sustainability of the territory and landscape culture as the principal value of development. Structures in and of the landscape, volumes of horizontal development, recollection of greenhouses and nurseries that come between new and old structures in continuous dialog. Semi-rural structures and semi-structural agricultures, like vegetable chromosomes, recall ancient urban gardens to genetic memory. These gardens stood and still remain today inside the old city. With their profile drawn along the perimeter of the north-south distributive zones, furnished platforms of garden are arranged, varying in type and content. These elements of the urban park are made up of small forests, rows of trees, tracts of land, gravel and sand, basins of water and irregularly situated fences. The fences that enclose these well-defined masses of gardens and nurseries become semi-structural agricultures. Vast spaces that function as a connection between the various zones make up the new squares of the neighborhood. The redistribution of the vehicular traffic flow is aimed at preserving the centrality of the area. The presence of motor vehicles is limited to the periphery of the lot. Via Berni, via Erbosa and a new road at the north, parallel to the railway line, will allow access to all public functions. The inside of the lot, liberated from these presences, will exclusively include bike paths and pedestrian zones.
Ordered along a north-south grid, the distributive zones produce urban space in which new functions are arranged, useful to the enhancement of the whole territory. It generally concerns public functions (an Education Center, a Neighborhood Center, a Recreation Center and a Display Center for Nurseries), redesigning an ordered street grid with the interurban metro stop serving the Pistoian plain and the presence of new social development residences. These residences are aimed toward a flexible residential structure, and by flexible meaning contemporaneity, made up of evolutions, immigrations, fragmentations. The Education Center becomes a social and formative center for this part of the city, being placed near the existing preschool. It is composed of an elementary and middle school, adjacent to the existing preschool. Next to the educational structures, integrated with them, the Recreation Center rises up. Among the public structures and the social residences, above the green platforms, small buildings stand, the pennies of the city, memory of those isolated structures, recurring along the profile of the extensive plains. These buildings are principally thought of as neighborhood services, placed above furnished platforms of the park. These are the pennies of the city, the generating module through which it spreads horizontally, and the vastest new structures. Multiples of these profiles bring forth coverings to protect small cafes, entrances to parking lots and private gardens, adapting themselves to the movements of the zones.
These horizontal coverings laid on the ground become platforms that, through folds and inclinations, make up visual and material variations on the horizontality of the land, forming new functional spaces, parking places, access to public parking lots and small open theaters. The placement of the Display Center for Nurseries, on the existing area of Dano (today occupied by the homonymous disposal establishment), creates the possibility of inserting the neighborhood, with its 23 hectares of urban park, into the vastest territorial system in the course of Pistoian nurseries. This comes about with the desire of providing valuable studies and research, creating cultural and financial sustainability for the nursery-based culture of the territory. The presence of laboratories and research facilities, in addition to exposition and analysis centers, aim to combine this Display Center to the existing Pistoian university activities, in the group of Nursery Sciences, environment and management.
Il progetto
Vita e sostenibilità del territorio diventano i cardini guida di questo progetto. L'alta percentuale di verde, pari a circa il 90% dell'area d'intervento, si distribuisce uniformemente su tutta la superficie. Non avremmo più il giardino o il tradizionale parco pubblico recintato di ottocentesca memoria ma un'intera area urbana che adotta il valore di sostenibilità del territorio e cultura del paesaggio come il valore primo di sviluppo. Architetture nel e del paesaggio, volumi dallo sviluppo orizzontale, memoria di serre e vivai, che trovano collocazione, in dialogo continuo, fra nuove e vecchie architetture. Architetture semi-agricole e agricolture semi-architettoniche come cromosomi vegetali, richiamano la memoria genetica degli antichi orti urbani che sorgevano e ancora oggi persistono all'interno della città storica. Con il loro profilo disegnato lungo il perimetro delle fasce distributive nord-sud, si dispongono allinterno di 42 cromosomi vegetali, filari di alberi, in variazioni di tipo ed essenza, piattaforme attrezzate di verde, frammenti di parco urbano costituiti da piccoli boschi, piani di terra, ghiaia e sabbia, vasche d'acqua e aree il cui profilo irregolare è definito dalla massa compatta di orti e vivai. Gli spazi di relazione, le piazze ed i percorsi all'interno dell'area sono costituiti dai vuoti fra le fasce.
La nuova distribuzione dei flussi di traffico veicolare è mirata a salvaguardare la centralità e la vivibilità dell'area, limitando la penetrazione degli autoveicoli all'interno del lotto d'intervento mantenendo ai suoi margini i flussi di traffico più intensi. Sarà creato un nuovo asse viario a nord, parallelo alla linea ferroviaria, che permetterà l'accesso alle funzioni pubbliche: il Centro per listruzione ed il Centro sportivo. Assieme a Via Berni e Via Erbosa, costituirà lo snodo viario carrabile più importante. All'interno del lotto saranno privilegiati i percorsi pedonali e ciclabili, favoriti dalla distribuzione omogenea delle funzioni. Le fasce distributive, ordinate secondo una maglia nord-sud, nuova topografia del luogo, generano lo spazio urbano su cui vengono collocate le nuove funzioni utili alla valorizzazione dell'intero territorio. I principali interventi progettuali consistono nel localizzare le funzioni a carattere pubblico, ridisegnare una maglia stradale ordinata, creando una fermata della metropolitana extraurbana a servizio di questo margine urbano.
Le nuove Residenze sociali, avranno un impianto planimetrico flessibile, capace di sostenere le trasformazioni a cui, nel tempo, inevitabilmente saranno sottoposte per l'inarrestabile flessibilità del mondo contemporaneo fatto di evoluzioni, immigrazioni, frammentazioni. Il Centro per l'istruzione, costituito da una scuola elementare e media, adiacenti all'attuale scuola materna, assume il ruolo di centro sociale e formativo per questa parte della città. Il Centro Sportivo si colloca di fianco al polo scolastico ad integrarne le funzioni. Nello spazio urbano a sud del lotto, sulla superficie attualmente occupata da un centro commerciale, viene previsto linserimento di un Centro civico. Fra architetture pubbliche, residenze sociali e piattaforme di verde, sorgono piccole costruzioni, i centesimi della città, a memoria di quelle architetture isolate, ricorrenti lungo il profilo delle estese pianure . Questi edifici sono pensati come architetture di servizio al Centro per il vivaismo ed allintero Parco urbano, svolgendo la funzione di spazi espositivi, ambienti per la ricerca, caffè e spazi polifunzionali a servizio del verde pubblico. Il centesimo di città rappresenta il modulo generatore delle nuove e più ampie architetture.
Multipli dei profili, generano, adeguandosi ai movimenti delle fasce, lame di copertura a protezione di più piccole architetture, volumi in cemento ed U-glass, piccoli luoghi dincontro, parcheggi e orti privati. Queste lame orizzontali si adagiano sul terreno diventando piattaforme che, attraverso piegature ed inclinazioni, costituiscono variazioni visive e materiche all'orizzontalità del terreno dando vita a nuovi spazi funzionali, luoghi di sosta e piccoli teatri all'aperto. La collocazione del Centro espositivo per il vivaismo, sull'attuale area del Dano (oggi occupata dall' impianto per lo smaltimento dei rifiuti), offre la possibilità di inserire il quartiere con i suoi 23 ettari di parco urbano, all'interno del più vasto sistema territoriale del vivaismo pistoiese. Il Centro affiancherà alla principale vocazione espositiva, funzioni didattiche e scientifiche costituendo un supporto, culturale e finanziario, all'attività vivaistica del territorio. Inoltre saranno istituiti laboratori per analisi e ricerche botaniche allo scopo di connettere le attività del Centro con quelle della Facoltà di Scienze Vivaistiche del Polo Universitario pistoiese e far convergere funzioni didattiche ed economiche.
