Chiaramonte Gulfi an experience of urban morphology

The paper illustrates a design experience for the city of Chiaramonte Gulfi, during the International Laboratory of Architecture_LId’A coordinated by Laura Thermes. In one of the laboratories – directed by the author with Federica Visconti and in relation to those coordinated by Carlo Moccia and Marco Mannino – the team worked on the redefinition of a “wall belt”. It was determined by the construction of a continuous strip in relationship to agricultural divisions and peri-urban plots during the seventies. The huge strip determined, on one hand, a new “urban artifact” (Rossi, 1966) of morphological value – even if of limited architectural value – as a kind of town walls to the ancient city, on the other it opposed the typical nebulized growth of sprawl-city. The project aims to propose a comprehensive reformulation for this wall, working in the significant points, highlighting discontinuities and openings to the landscape and establishing new relationships between the valley and the perched character - as in an acropolis - of the medieval center, re-entering portions of nature still existing in the urban fabric. The project combines two ways of composition, the stereotomic and the tectonic and develops the theme of the bastion corresponding to a hiatus of building curtain proposing a new condition overlooking open to the vision of the landscape of the Comiso valley and simultaneously founding itself as one of the elements of a distinctive and interconnected system of “places” able to establish long distance relationships and summarize the whole urban morphology and geography of Chiaramonte.