The plastic / elastic dyad in the process of urban transformations. Some observations on the case of the Iberian cultural area.
The reality that human being has built around himself – and that he continually transforms – is increasingly complex, specialized, heterogeneous. A material reality that has been stratified, more or less sensibly, everywhere. The awareness of the transformative anthropic act has changed the relationship between the human being and the matter around him: the spontaneous consciousness, that once guided the action of construction as consolidated by a broad collective knowledge, changes and adapts itself to the renewed and increased critical capacity that the human being has developed, in an autonomous and individualized way, in the course of his existence. The product of anthropic action par excellence is what we call a “city”, that is an urban organism that condenses, in certain temporal spheres, the common characteristics of a defined constructive culture. Today the city represents an intertwining of difficulties that is only apparently inextricable. For this reason, the description and study of a complex reality, such as that of a city, cannot be separated from an excluding approach and, at the same time, organic and as much as possible generalizing.The use of dyads, therefore, proved to be an appropriate tool in the attempt to describe the complexity of reality, to generalize the common characteristics that define human constructions. There are many pairs of opposite terms that describe architecture and cities, polarizing and contrasting certain characteristics rather than others. The formation of the “plastic/elastic” dyad is relatively recent and therefore meets a field of application almost completely unexplored.
Keywords: dyads, process, transformation, plastic/elastic, typology.
