The Street Through the Building
摘要
In the Venice Biennale How Will We Live Together? (2021), the installation Home Ground by Alison Brooks, reflects upon the nature of ground floor spaces in architectureArchitecture as both thresholds to the private realm of the home and linking systems to urban public spaces. In cities, given the tendency toward universal mobilization, Cacciari, in his essay La Città, suggested considering the end use of buildings’ ground floors for urban porosity and public circulation. The identification of circulation with public space is an old issue. In ancient Rome, Trajan’s Markets were crossed by the ViaBiberatica connecting two areas of the city. The shortcuts in the medieval city constituted a sub-system of circulation on a pedestrianPedestriansscaleScale. The lyrical character of circulation was thus understood, referring largely to the idea of the street as a public space. The street in America is a place of crossing, which is dynamic in nature and does not lead from one center to another as in Europe, but is configured as pure circulation. This feature has its origin in the primordial Main Street, a place of passage, a pure extension, and as in the Las Vegas Strip archetype, such pure circulation is a public space devoid of centrality. Baudrillard defines this condition as a (new) eccentric center, flexible, dynamic and active, freed from the historical and static centrality of the Old World. Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown’s works and thoughts in their CarryurbanismUrbanismInside the Building are a fundamental reference for the evolution of these topics.