New Public Spaces in the Historic City Centre. The Verdi Theatre Area in Padua, Italy, as a Case Study

The theme of this paper is the design of new public spaces and new building types in the historic city center. The method adopted is based on analyzing the history of the city to understand the urban morphology, considered to be the memory and image of the community. 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 physical structure, and this is especially so in the historic city center. The teaching on the Architectural and Urban Composition 2 and 3 courses at the Department of Civil, Environmental, and Architectural Engineering at the University of Padua examines basic 1960s studies concerning urban morphology and typological analysis, especially by Aldo Rossi. The theme of the spatial aspects is investigated by studying the formal image in the transformations of the city as the starting point for designing new architecture. The Verdi Theatre 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: here the order and hierarchy of the elements that characterize the form of the place have experienced significant alterations since the Second World War. Progressing from the study of how the area has evolved through time, students had to define new proposals for the area.