URBAN INTERIORS. THE DOMESTIC SPACE AND THE CITY/THE STREET AS A LIVING ROOM.

Urban dynamics affect cities’ architecture, where the relationship between interior and exterior, public and private realm, are part of a single design process. The design of the threshold, transitive interface space connecting different spatial conditions, changes according to the operative context. The aim is to investigate the inter-relationality of spatial phenomena, from the higher scale to the smaller one and vice-versa. In this scenario, the street plays a fundamental role, being considered, according to the Italian and Mediterranean tradition, as a social and public space belonging to the community. The street is the place towards which the architectural space is projected, establishing relational relationships often without a net distinction between interior and exterior. Giò Ponti, in the first issue of DOMUS in 1928, asserted that in the Italian architecture there was not great difference between interior and exterior: with its arcades, loggias, verandas, terraces, the interior extends towards the exterior and both are melt as a single architectural whole. The relationship interior-street has been therefore strong and direct. As Le Corbusier had complained in URBANISME in 1925 the sudden appearance of cars in the early XX century was a disruptive event that put in crisis the relationship between man and street in European cities. As a consequence of this, since then this relation has been slowly but constantly neglected and alienated, till its dramatic negation affecting many contemporary towns. This very need of re-appropriation of public space by pedestrian-citizens had led Louis Kahn to define the street as a “living room”, belonging to the community. Thus, this restates the significance, in the social and connective fabric of our cities, of the urban public space, with its squares, streets and alleys, places not mainly reserved to the vehicular traffic but primarily dedicated to citizens.