New housing and the historical city. The Santa Chiara area in Padua as a case study

The theme of this paper is the design of new housing types and new public spaces in the historic medieval center of the city. The method adopted is based on analyzing the history of the city to understand the urban morphology. Only an understanding of the relationships that link unchanging monuments and temporary parts of the city will result in correct design decisions for new housing in the historic context. The physical specificity of the urban form is the result of its spatial structure. More than political, social, and economic systems, which are important but not sufficient, reasons for its special nature can be found because of its constancy. Planning new buildings starts from understanding the context, that is, its overall physical structure, and this is especially so in the historic Medieval city center. Analyzing the direct relationship between the architectural and the urban scale is fundamental to a successful design process. The teaching on the Architectural and Urban Composition 2 and 3 courses at the Depart-ment of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at the University of Padua ex-amines basic 1960s studies concerning urban morphology and typological analysis carried on by Saverio Muratori, Egle Renata Trincanato, and especially Aldo Rossi. The theme of the spatial aspects of public spaces is specifically investigated by studying the formal image in the transformations of the city as the starting point for designing new architecture and housing. The Santa Chiara area in Padua is one of the subjects investigated by the students. The area was an opportunity to redesign the lost unity of a historic part of the city. Other evidence of the past survives in addition to the church and the convent that gave their name to the area, which were destroyed in the 1960. Here the urban morphology is considered to be the memory and image of the community, with its structure being based on the part of the Grendene corn mills that still exists and on what remains of the medieval wall that enclosed the city on the south side, near the now demolished Porta Torricelle, on the Naviglio (internal canal) that protected the wall and has been partially culverted. The order and hierarchy of the elements that characterize the form of this historic place have experienced significant alterations since the Second World War. The Santa Chiara area was used as a case study because it was a reference point for the community in previous centuries, and also because the Police Headquarters standing where the convent was will be transferred to its new location near the railway station in a few months and a new order in this public space will be possible. Progressing from the study of how the area has evolved through time, students had to define new proposals for the area that involved testing new housing types.