Phd in ARCHITECTURE AND CONSTRUCTION

Thesis title: Costruire relazioni tra le parti. L’inflessione come strategia per l’architettura del progetto urbano

The research focuses on architecture in relation to the city, examining how individual parts, through their relationships, interact with the whole. In presenting this reflection, the thesis proposes the possibility of reversing the traditional relationship between object and context, attempting to examine not only how architecture shapes the space of the city, but also how the reflections of contextual conditions impact the construction of architecture. From this perspective, the research, through the concept of inflection, questions the possibility of imagining a dimension in which architecture, while maintaining a relationship with the context, does not fall into mimetic practices but, on the contrary, fosters the emergence of new relationships between things. The subject of analysis is therefore the relationship between architecture and the city, framed through the concept of inflection, introduced by Robert Venturi in his essay Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture. Although it is a concept that has been little explored, the critical-interpretative approach undertaken here does not follow a cumulative logic. On the other hand, the aim is to outline, through the definition of inflection, an intermediate zone that, positioned at the delicate boundary between the autonomy and heteronomy of architectural form, encourages a reflection on the compositional theme of the relationship between architecture and the city. The critical hypothesis that the research aims to explore concerns the intuition that inflection can be interpreted as a relational strategy based on the idea that certain parts of a building, by altering themselves and thus inflecting on a formal level, can contribute to the unity of the urban organism, without deforming or losing their formal status. The issue being focused on is the ability of inflection to take the contextual data as an eminently constructive factor, repositioning pre-existing elements within new relational structures. In this sense, inflection is conceived as a possible strategy capable of acting on the relationship between architecture and the city, without one of the two terms being subordinated to the other. To achieve this, the research proposes a radical shift in perspective regarding the notion of inflection, attempting to verify how this concept, operating between objects, defines the complementarity between different parts. The discussion of the topic is divided into three chapters and is based on a comparative methodology, as evident from the structure of the table of contents. The first chapter defines the conceptual dimension of inflection and develops progressively through three stages: the investigation of the meaning of the term, the review of the state of the art, and finally, the formulation of a definition. The second chapter, instead, focuses on the characterization of an element that can be defined as inflected. This goal is developed through three categories, which on one hand contribute to the construction of a theoretical framework around the concept of inflection, and on the other, define the methodological structure of the analysis, addressed in full in the third chapter. The latter, in fact, focuses on the identification of some modalities of inflection through the identification of two interpretative categories that, operating on a comparative structure, attempt to develop a critical reading capable of defining the effects produced by an element recognizable as inflected. The intent is not to propose an endless range of possibilities, but rather to validate a stable—or more precisely, strategic—method for intervening in the construction of a contextual relationship.