A scale to the sky
Bologna was named Silva Turrita in the late Middle Age. In a representation of the city in the XII sec. Bologna was a little Manhattan.
Nowadays just a few towers still exist.
The project reinterprets the Middle Age tower-house typology as a way to re-densify the historical city center, nowadays lucking of tenants.
Small proportion towers, working on the matrix of existing spaces, increase the potential and quality of life on the ground, experimenting a new model of urban relationships at 30 m of altitude. Housing towers are interbred with medieval existing fabric, trying to investigate new ways to live downtown, in order to create a supply crossing social groups and stimulating the complexity of the polis.
A tower housing is made by stacked, overlapped rooms. A room is seen as the space of proximity, of everyday life, the right proportion to introduce a dynamic and adaptive vertical community. The plot is reduced to the minimum size, the location traces out the existing fabric. The fabric of the consolidated city is a well-recognized model.
We must invent new types of settlements on mutable, urbanized lands, on areas recyclable into new functions in the medium or long term. It is a rediscovery of the next-door fund, considered under a new point of view, spaces of possibilities.