Urban analysis and the planning project in the historical city. Case study of the Eremitani area of the city of Padua, Italy

In many cases in Italy the outcomes produced by building speculation in the immediate post-war period have compromised the quality of historical urban cities. This contribution reflects on the opportunity to recompose the lost unity of the public space using a method that in finding out the reasoning underlying the city, makes history an indispensable instrument within the project. In fact, the urban project originates in the need to find continuity with the history of the city from which potential and energy can be interpreted in the light of the needs of the contemporary society. Consequently, the pretext of novelty advanced by the project does not set out formal solutions to unpredictable needs, characteristic of a certain ideological radicalism in the avant-guarde isms and an old mythology of the new incarnated in the functionalism of the International Style but are fully inserted in the dialectic relationship with the traditional historic urban forms. There is no simple formal-mimetic relationship with the latter but archetypes underlie the origin of the form. In this context the method is a continuation of the best studies of typological and urban morphology analysis (especially Aldo Rossi, L'architettura della città, 1966) that not only view the city as a product of what are certainly important functional systems (social, economic, political) but above all contemplate the urban form as a result of its formal structure. The teaching at the University of Padua (Department of Civil, Environmental and Architectural Engineering, course of Architectural and Urban Composition 2) follows this tradition of thought that is specifically oriented to the theme of public space and its relationships with private ones, looking to the formal and spatial structure of the city as an indispensable premise to the definition of the urban project. The area of Eremitani in Padua is one of the thematic environments with which the students on the course were confronted. A symbolic place representative of the city, it lost its formal identity and unity with the other parts of the city following speculation and the urban choices that characterised the reconstruction of the building fabric damaged during the Second World War. The outcomes produced by the projects presented by the students have verified the validity of an operational method that in taking heed of the content and characteristics of the place finally finds continuity with the history of the city and its memory.