ADDIZIONI

Edited by Andrea Zamboni e Oliviero Brognoli Università degli studi di Parma

Tipografie riunite Donati, 2020.

If we assume that we see building as an act always additive, it is equally true that our cities are the result of these additions over time, and the city itself is an eternal non-finite. According to this principle we firmly believe in, construction is always an action of completion in relation to a pre-existence. Since ancient times, construction by stratification and addition has shaped our cities. And excluding those sporadic cases in which the urban form impressed in a given historical period in a city or a part of it corresponds exactly to its architectural form, that is to that of its individual buildings, and has remained frozen at that time - cases that are exceptions to the rule -, the remaining part of our cities has built itself piece by piece through its buildings, growing from a more or less homogeneous nucleus of buildings, gradually acquiring losing homogeneity in the repeated addition or substitution process. Process that becomes more and more convulsive, rapid and schizophrenic from the city centers towards the outside, starting from the first suburbs and twentieth-century expansions to the enormously extended suburbs that introduce the problem not so much of the relationship between building and building but of the hybridization between cities and countryside.

According to a Darwinian principle of survival, only buildings capable of transforming themselves or adapting to new uses because they are available and more resistant than the necessary change of use, or those ultra-restricted because they deserve conservation, or those resistant to cataclysms, such as to the earthquakes that punctually strike our cities together with the incessant destructive action of man, they resist and see other buildings with which they enter into dialogue or reject the comparison, always contributing to the construction of the architectural stratification and urban complexity that we know well. Here, along this process of incessant action over time, a nineteenth-century building finds itself next to a baroque one rather than a medieval or twentieth-century one.

But the theme of addition can limit the field to a dialogue between two entities, or rather between two bodies: a pre-existing building and a new one. It is a purely architectural theme that implies a choice of field to be pondered with great attention, that is the nature of this addition. It can be configured as a completion, as a more or less autonomous insertion or as a new unit that contains them both in a different unit. In this challenge lies its being a purely architectural theme, well beyond the functional, constructive and conservation needs. It is a question that prefigures a point of view even before picking up the pencil.