the meaning of "Large Scale"

The Doctorate in Urban Planning of Naples is concerned with the question of large scale in the area of research that considers the territory as an architecture, or a composition of elements that establish between themselves relationships of form. The image of the territory that the urban plan researches, according to an Italian tradition, is that image which tells us of the reasons of its material form intended as a synthethis of its history and geography. The urban materials that we use to reconstruct this ‘figure’, choosing them from a concrete reality, are signs that refer to a precise architectural and urban meaning. In the area of the possibilities of architectural and urban research on the large scale, I have specified two of them in this doctorate thesis: - one investigating the nature of the space-territory that, though different from that internal architecture intended as a single building, or from that geographical, contains some characters; - the other based on the techniques and ways to represent this space, beginning with a reflection on the quality of the historical cartography and on the potentiality of the actual digital cartography. The geographical map that, beginning from the first printed atlas in 1570 by A. Lafrery, substitutes the old maps kept in the ‘isolari’, represents, according to Farinelli , the passage from ‘place’ to ‘space’ meant as a geographical abstraction. The abstraction represented by the metric scale of reference, constitutes an image of the territory based on a principle of classification that tends to cancel the differences. In a project that is defined ‘urban’, the territory returns to being a ‘place’, or a part of the earth’s surface that is not equivalent to any other, that can not be exchanged for another without everything changing . What defines the characteristics of this place, is the ‘value of position’ of the elements through which we can understand not only their ‘being’ but also their ‘being in relation to’. The thesis specifies the meaning of this term through the relationship ‘position/com-position’. The elements that make up the territory have a value of intrinsic position, that is connected to the geographical and historical reasons that have determined not only their original position but also their characters. It is possible to try to re-read this value of position through the reference to some archetypes of position, building ‘types of space’ . Recognising in the place an archetypal structure means not only identifying the role that each element has in respect to the actual configuration of the territory, but also the value of each one in respect to its possible trasformations. What is necessary to understand is above all this second value which can be read as a morphogenetic value of the concept of position and of relationship. The ability to ‘generate form’ in the centuries has been translated into elements that, losing their specific and contingent character, return to models to imitate, to interpret or solidify. A sort of universal idea that returns to an intelligible quality of things that is abstracted from the tangible reality.