Being Modern beyond the Conflict: the Architecture of Void in Gorizia and Nova Gorica

The urban system of Gorizia (Italy) and Nova Gorica (Slovenia), as the point of contact of the interrupted territory crossed by the river Isonzo-Soča, has been over the centuries the stage of a conflicting history. Due to its shifting border condition and challenging co-existence between its parts, it is a territory assembled by fragments instead of plans, either materialized through exceptions rather than rules. Starting from the recognition of the fragmentary and conflicting nature of the project of modernity, this paper traces a trajectory to investigate the hidden layers of its spatial realm and discourse, in order to question whereas the project of modernity could reveal its unfinished condition as a prospective. Indeed, the permanence and the countless variation of void will be explored within the multiple garden cities imagined, designed, built and lived in the territory of Gorizia and Nova Gorica. Reckoning with the modern spatial discourse, from the symbolic and figurative aspects of the Athens Charter, to the theories of Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Tomorrow and Camillo Sitte’s Der Stadte-Bau, heterogeneous city images emerged on the isontine ground: from the green and functionalist Nova Gorica by Edvard Ravnikar, to Antonio Lasciac’s projections for a garden Gorizia, or the therapeutic vision of an Austrian Nice. Reading these fragments archaeologically in their symbolic and figurative aspects, it is therefore possible to reconstruct the birth of a condition and a view in movement, sometimes narrative, sometimes projective, certainly partial, transitory and alternative but which has been confronted with the symbolic horizon of his vision. The void is then a critical device of the existing city, of the many ideas of imagined cities, of localized utopias, of those realized and lived in the territory of Gorizia and Nova Gorica, which can be read as the dispositive of the modern eye, or, the invention of a landscape.