The “demonstrative city”: a model from a global architectural process

Abstract

[EN] This research springs from the idea that the human-built environment, from its origin until today, is the result of a constantly developing process. Throughout this progression, one can observe the evolution of the courtyard house as if it was an architectural organism, that has now followed more than two thousand years of unfolding of human building, from the formation of the fence (interpreted as a primitive construction) till the latest innovations of housing and urban research (latter combining elements of various cultures and ages). As society has been growing and changing – recently more rapidly than ever before in history – so has the development of courtyard house, always in tight correlation with the population’s ever changeable needs. From this analysis arises a hypothesis about the dynamics of this process (a theory already established by Muratori), of which ideas materialized in practice have been most profitable for contemporary urban design. Organized within a model called “demonstrative city”, the resulting layout is a blueprint of a simplified urban environment. This system serves as a tool capable of inserting the beneficial aspects extracted from this research into the urban environment, which further confirm the validity of these results. For this reason the “demonstrative city” can’t be considered as a project, but more so as a simulation of urban reality. Establishing this as a tool in architecture will be the first step to its test in the urban project.