La casa dei greci e la composizione architettonica e urbana

Thanks to the collaboration developed for Incipit Lab1 – coordination of the first-year Architectural Design workshops – I had the opportunity to get to know Valeria Pezza better, focusing on some of her cultural preferences. These preferences find an important center of gravity in the declaration of Architectural and Urban Composition and explain why, even in her first-year teaching, the Federico II professor has always paid equal attention to housing and the urban environment. Her Architectural Design Workshops, in fact, embrace architecture and the city with an overall balance, devoting the same care to both components. This premise is necessary to frame the way in which the Neapolitan professor directs her observation to the cities of the Greeks in Sicily and, more generally, to those in southern Italy. Studying an inexhaustible source from a specific point of view, that of the house in relation to the urban figure, is a critical perspective that is very different from a generic research activity on one or more Greek colonies. The starting assumption is that ‘the form of domesticity’, with its way of coming together, is a substantial part of the urban configuration. Within the Greek city system, it is fascinating to reflect on the disciplinary dialectic that dwellings establish with temples.