1999, Paola Viganò

Elementary City

PhD in Architectural and Urban Composition

associate professor of urbanism at the Institute of Architecture and Urbanism of the University of Venice

began practice with partner, Bernardo Secchi, in 1990

other significant publications: Territories of new modernity (2001)Extreme City (2010)

about_

elementarism

Vigano adapts elementarism for architecture and urbanism from the work and writings of artist, Theo Van Doseberg:

Simultaneous Counter-CompositionTheo Van Doseberg1929

“Elementarism does not propose to arrive at a balanced re-

lationship between things: ’Elementarism postulates a non-

balanced counter composition as a phenomenon of a time

space tension of colour, line or plane, always in opposition to

the natural or architectural structure.’”

elementarism + urbanism

fragment/ detaildeconstruction/ compositionsurveying/ namingurban strata/ tracescomplex/ simple urban materials

fragment_detail

proposition of studying urbanism frequently meditates upon heterogeneity and discontinuity

cities exist in a condition of fragmentation

the city can be considered to be a sequence of urban fragments in the sense that serial music can be considered to be a sequence of tonal fragments

the fragmentation of the modern city occurs randomly; though repeated, finite elements maintain their interrelation.

elementarism requires oscillating analysis of two scales: the urban fragment and the detail

deconstruction_composition

deconstruction as tool of elementarian analysis

elementarism in urbanism is a process of survey that entails extremely close reading of the city

deconstructing the banal, everyday and obvious landscape into the most fundamental of elements

the city is illuminated as a place of difference and repetition

surveying_naming

strategies of looking at the contemporary city that invest it with new possibilities for interpretation

walking: form of deconstructing; naming objects and “breaking down the city into its elements”

synecdoche- reduces and densifies the city

asyndeton- fragments the whole

urban territory- practices, culture, ‘materiality’

urban strata_traces

stratigraphy- analysis of layers which build up over time to produce

strata that are indicative of the conditions which created their deposition

fragments within a given urban context may appear to lack relation

however analysis of urban stratification reveals hidden relationships

“the degrees of consistency are only revealed insofar as they are taken apart”

simple_complex materials

simple materials- buildings, streets, paths, trees, sporting grounds, etc

complex materials- path w/ trees, sports complex, street w/ drain, etc

material analysis syntagmatic- function paradigmatic substance, construction

urban grammar and syntax- create place by defining a framework in which segments of urban materials and fragments can occur in sequences.

systems- ensembles of urban fragments and segments connected by repeating features