Scientific Research and Urban Design. Saverio Muratori between History and Landscape.
The contemporary city is, above all, a “city of knowledge”. All processes that define it have a high scientific-cognitive content and in order to manage them, awareness, critical skills and cultural openness are necessary. But this is the right field of scientific research. On the other hand, the complexity of the city’s transformation processes, the dynamism and volatility of the agents of change that these processes trigger, make it increasingly necessary to adopt approaches capable of grasping these phenomena to translate them into new operational solutions. The role of scientific research in architecture therefore appears to play a decisive role in the knowledge, interpretation and guidance of urban transformation processes. One of the first experiences of “scientific foundation” of the urban project is that carried out by Saverio Muratori since the 1940s. An experience, long forgotten by his own students, which on the contrary represents an interesting methodological-scientific attempt on which it is appropriate to come again. It is the “structural” value of these experiences that makes them useful for the current debate on the city. It is their ability to synthesize needs that are often very distant from each other, critically unifying them in the common instance of knowledge, that makes them a paradigmatic “prologue” for the scientific project of the contemporary city.
Keywords: Urban Design, Morphology, Muratori, Landscape.
