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A city is (not) a tree – designing new urban environments

A lecture by the Italian Architect Cino Zucchi

“A city is not a tree”: in his famous 1965 article, Christopher Alexander criticizes the abstract, tree-like scheme which governed the urban planning theory of those years; in opposition to it Alexander argues that the “natural” city, the one sedimented in time, functions rather as a “semi-lattice”, as an open structure, where parts are cross-connected by different orders of relationships. 

The recurrent geological and biological metaphors in today’s urban theory and research seem to hide the fear we are not able to produce an environment with the qualities of  the “second nature” we feel in the traditional city, which today we can only reproduce in the form of a commercial caricature.


The environmental disaster will not be avoided by an Arcadian reverie, but rather by taking the full responsibility of our transformation acts of the Earth’s surface. The landscape of the new world cannot be but a strange mixture of man-made and natural environments in a necessarily symbiotic relationship, and this forces us to rethink everyday our design behaviours, “grafting” new spaces on the existing ones.


The beauty of the city is multiple, fallacious, occasional; but when it occurs, it overcomes the one of nature, it comforts us in its absence of perfection. Our city is not a tree, and for this reason we can understand it. The city protects us from the merciless inexplicability of nature, from its cruel behaviours, from the moral oppression of its “good example”. 


 


Biographical notes:


 


Born in Milano in 1955, Cino Zucchi has earned degrees in Architectural Design at M.I.T. and at the Politecnico di Milano, where he is currently Chair Professor. He has taught in many international design workshops and has been a John T. Dunlop Visiting  Professor at the GSD of Harvard University. Author of several articles and books on matters of architectural and urban theory, he  participated to various editions of the Milano Triennale and of the Venice Biennale of Architecture, where he has been the curator of the Italian Pavilion in 2014. He was the president of the Jury of the Mies van der Rohe Award 2015.


 


Together with his studio CZA he has designed and realized numerous buildings, public spaces, master plans, many of which deserved mentions and first prizes in international awards. Major urban design works include the renovation of the Junghans factory site in Venice, that of the Alfa Romeo factory area in Milano and the Keski Pasila master plan in Helsinki (Finland). Recent architectural realizations include the Car Museum and the Lavazza HQ in Turin, the Salewa HQ in Bozen, the U15 Office Building in Assago, as well as housing complexes in Milano, Parma, Bologna and Ravenna.

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