The City and The House

The city and the house. One cannot address the issue of the House without also considering the City. However, by broadening the theme to the town one could risk pushing further, as the original idea we used to have of the town is probably no longer valid. One cannot in any case omit the feeling of the failure of city planning. It was already present in the last decades of the past Century. The tool in which one believed as urban science seems to have grown apart from the actual transformations. Epochal changes in society and in people’s lives are happening and their impact is such that it may instil doubts about a persistence of their existence. Rem Koolhaas, for example, after over forty years from Delirious New York, collects a series of essays in a single volume under this emblematic title: “Studies on (what was called at the time) the city”. The Dutch archistar, starting from his experiences, reaches the conclusion that the city as such does not exist anymore, as it has been distorted and enlarged as never before. He underlines that: “any kind of insistence upon its primal condition is inevitably irrelevant, thanks to nostalgia.”