Una azione di resistenza urbana. Il progetto per l’Avenue des Champs-Élysées a Parigi/An action of urban resistance. The Avenue de Champs-Élysées Project in Paris

Cocco Giovanni Battista;Manca Andrea

2022-01-01

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Abstract

In the second part of twentieth century, the thought on the European city identifies in the Urban Project the intermediate scale of spatial interpretation and design, with which to restore the relationship between architecture and the city, typology and morphology, interrupted by modernity. As is well known, this analytical lens emphasises a new dialectic: by rediscovering the city, architecture finds its reasons and its human dimension, the complexity of space and above all the historical; by rediscovering architecture, the project for the city rediscovers the richness of the spatial articulations and symbolic meanings of urban forms. As has emerged in the cultural debate on the subject, while Urban Project in Italy, confronting a system often incapable of governing complexity, has failed in its primary objectives, in France, it has instead shown itself capable of generating a season of great modifications, firstly in its capital. The reasons of this can be traced back to the ability of the actors to face structural difficulties but, above all, to the concretisation of the theoretical dimension in the academic, institutional and professional fields. In this context, a pre-eminent role is to be attributed to the figure of Bernard Huet, major interpreter, between the 1970s and 1990s, of the theoretical current of “Urban Architecture”. As the Urban Project spreads capillary in Europe, a series issues emerged, firstly the growing awareness that the urban landscape is as much the result of design and form as of the ways in which people inhabit it. This aspect has generated a “living dialectic” between the History of Muratorian memory and the community that modifies and forms in landscapes. The latter, in fact, finds in public space the true generator of the citizenship a potential rooting relation be-tween individuals (Huet, 2003), a place of pro-duction of collective reality. The investigation considers the Parisian context.