Progetto per l'Ex Area del Navile a Bologna. The ex-market area of Bologna. Workshop internazionale di progettazione

This project for a large area in north-west Bologna known as the “Ex Mercato Navile” is an urban project and as such its forms are inspired by the larger scale of the city. Thus, it is clear that from both theoretical and practical standpoints, this project proposal puts the form of the city and its historical evolution at the very core of the urban and architectural invention. In other words, taking the forms of the city’s architecture and transfiguring them into as many forms of contemporary design. So, one of the features of this design approach consists in considering the city – following Lévi-Strauss’ counsel – as “the human thing par excellence”; in which the memories, aspirations and desires of collective life converge, as is common knowledge. To a certain extent, this is a truism, but one which helps us think of urban artefacts as a form of spiritual life and therefore consider them a work of art. Seeing the city and its urban artefacts as a work of art means that in some way the relationship which is established between the city and the architectural invention must be primarily of an imaginative order. Indeed, I personally believe that with this approach we can revitalize and restore the relationship between the city and urban design within compositional research that is essentially rational, but also abounds in unsuspected developments. With this in mind, the first act in inventing an urban project consists precisely in drawing out themes of historical and figurative importance from the urban context. Consequently, the first gesture of any design is seeking out significant figures. Of the many places and numerous urban memories that the city of Bologna has to offer our gaze, three significant figures have been selected as an object for imaginative reflection on urban transformation: the waterways, the archetypical Bolognese silk mills, and the historical city’s long narrow streets with their continuous façades. The form of the city of Bologna has been marked by an important canal network of which only a small part is still visible today. The specific nature of this waterway network consists in series of canals fashioned over the course of time which could distribute water power through the inner depths of the urban structure and consequently favour the development of an important water-driven industry; facilitating in particular the development of cereal mills, waterwheels for treating hides and, above all, the construction of mills for spinning silk. Thanks to these urban machines, for centuries Bologna succeeded in producing the best silk thread to use as a warp for weaving precious cloths. As a result, during the seventeenth century, Bologna arrived at its particular urban layout precisely because of its silk industry, decisively consolidating its urban form as well as its image for the world. With the large basin of water, the four cylindrical towers deployed along the new canal and the long habitable bridge, the project proposes an evocative image of three significant figures drawn from the city’s urban history. In particular, the urban figure of the long habitable bridge, conceived equally as an urban machine, allows the project area to be linked to the south-western part of the consolidated city by passing over the railway lines, the People Mover monorail and Via de’Carracci. So, if we consider the icastic force that the historical forms can suggest and unleash, even when already forgotten, concealed or disguised, as in the case of Bologna’s waterways, we can say that what is now piercing the fabric is not entirely transiting via the past. Not everything can disappear forever because everything that vanishes from before our eyes excites us in some way. And what excites us becomes stratified in the personal and collective consciousness as an experience of the psyche and begs not to be forgotten.