Corso del Popolo in Terni: An Interpretative Hypothesis for the Contemporary Urban Design

Abstract

This work is grounded on the idea that the approach to the urban design should require a preordained cultural choice of interpretative paradigm of reality, allowing a selection of the significant values to be determined for the project itself. The proposed subject concerns a particular interpretation, theoretical as much as practical, provided by Mario Ridolfi and Volfango Frankl in the post-war reconstruction of the city of Terni, midway between the forties and sixties in the last century, through that which would define 500 meters Urbanism. Such a definition, used afterwards by the same authors in the discussion of their town planning experience, sounds like a phenomenological manifesto which identifies the physical and cultural dimension in which the urban design could significantly express a precise idea of a city. Also of great interest is the authors cultural matrix, which dates back to the work of the masters C.Sitte, G.Giovannoni, M.Piacentini, according to whom the theoretical observation on the city aesthetic is inextricably linked to its etymological nature of sensitive perception of the quality of the space, of its volumetric realisation and of its foundation upon History through the continuity with tradition. The paradigmatic example of this cultural position can be considered the Plan for Corso del Popolo, where the design consideration, developed along a forty years path, leaves the principles of architecture and those of town planning in an organic and unitary way, through the contextual realisation, on the part of Ridolfi and Frankl, of formidable architectures, as with the Franconi and the Pallotta Houses, and of the town planning tool subject to the rules and normative regulations of the planning. The research case, therefore, consistent with its interest in redefining a field of validity, aesthetic and ethical together, in the modern day construction of the city, is proposed as a tool of knowledge of reality and of its structure in terms of its possible planning hermeneutics.