Urban Interstices in Italy: Design Experiences

Urban interstices are the topic of this book, which discusses five different views and keys to their design in Italy. They can be thresholds and pulsating rooms, or interfaces, connectors, exchangers, and membranes. The critical path proposed is based on a review of seventy contemporary Italian cases and a collection of sixty projects.

Format: Paperback / softback
Publication date: 25 November 2021
Publisher: LetteraVentidue Edizioni srl

Urban interstices, the spaces between buildings and streets, are the focus of this book. What are urban interstices? What diverse issues, opportunities, roles, and concepts do they address?

The book's five chapters, written by urban planners, architects, and interior designers, offer five different perspectives and keys: Urban rewriting, Architectural threshold, Green rooms, Connecting publicness, and Ephemeral devices. These keys provide a framework for understanding the spectrum of urban interstices design in Italy.

Urban space can be interstitial in its ambiguous capacity to signify in the sense-making process. It can be a mute void, a space without meaning, or a meaningful room, a small and dense universe of suspension. Sometimes, the project for interstitial spaces aims to transform the former into the latter. On the other hand, the project can make the interstice an interface, connector, exchanger, membrane, or space of interrelation. Thus, urban interstices become alternatively thresholds and pulsating rooms, and urban catalysts activated by specific design moves and devices.

Urban interstices also speak of a general interstitial condition of urban space today. The critical path proposed here is based on a review of seventy contemporary Italian cases. The second part of the book presents a collection of sixty projects, while ten cases, two for each thematic key, are explored in brief monographic essays and interviews with the project authors.

These cases are the subject of the photographic essay, Visual narration, placed in the middle of the book.

AUTHORS: Bertrando Bonfantini, Ph.D., is Professor of Urbanism at Politecnico di Milano. He is currently the editor of the journal Territorio.

Imma Forino, Ph.D., is Professor of Interior Architecture and Exhibition Design at P. Polytechnic University of Turin. She is the author of numerous books and articles on architecture and urban design.

Weight: 650g
Dimension: 210 x 148 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9788862425667