Comune di Firenze, Ufficio Tematico Centro Storico

Prof. Arch. Lorenzino Cremonini

Giovanni-Elia Perbellini, Cinzia Todeschini, Mauro Zanotti

Comune di Firenze, Ufficio Tematico Centro Storico

Piano Strutturale, Via dei Servi 32, 50122 Firenze, Italy

"L'Arno Racconta"

Introduction
The light illuminates our world and therefore also our imagination. From this presupposed it is the project: to improve the urban quality through the light and the colour in those spaces, that if also rich of historical meaning, that they have lost their natural connotation inside the city.
Well knowing that the light can become a dowel in the resetting of the historical and personal memory of the city, the places of the past become scenografi- cal places in the empty space. The colour and the light unify and identify fragments of urban living creating a new dialogue between the subjects in the city. The perception of the city, the look and the touristical use constitute a meaningful aspect: the modern necessity of consumption of the image tends in fact in to condition unavoidably the substance, creating one evident dichotomy between the places of the city life and the places of touristical imaginary.
Replaced therefore the urban reality with the its imaginary, the real physical space with a series of icons and perspectives composed and chose by the user, the city organism is translate in visions, therefore the river Arno and the Uffizi becomes images and dreams of Florence. Real or dreamed, the city is a strong and constant presence in the daily living. The city fragments illustrate spaces dominated by ipercomunication for signs and images where the city life is marked the constant be used by the masses. The urban emptiness becomes expression not communication, interruption and absence.
We define urban emptiness a every inner free space in the urban pattern, a place potentially cleaned by the interpersonal exchanges. The artificial light, as emotional quality can improve the interpretation of the city, can become instrument of participation. The perception of place does not have to be modified only with constructed elements, but in the respect of the pre-existence and through accents of light, it can be made to emerge this or that particular, unexpected destucurations of the context during the day, by night they attract our attention on elements that otherwise would be passed unnoticed.
In fact thought like physical material, the light characterizes the quality and the objectual perception of the architectonic space; it defines the contours and it renders to our eyes the shapes and the volumes with which we enter in relation. Therefore through suggestions activated from the light, the architect can interpret symbolic means and acting on the contrasts can emphasize the idea of possible, alternative, architectonical spaces in the city and in the building. We can think in synthesis the light as construction material, in the moment in which it creates spaces and volumes that, even if non-material, virtual and ephemeral, exist and are represented in a psychological level of individual users. The luminous matter revitalizes submerge or forgotten shapes, allowing to discover to new truth, because to illuminate an atmosphere from the qualitative point of view, means to reinterpret the spatial relations from its inside and to characterize the meanfull elements.
Our actual necessity imposes us to give back emotional interest to the inner and outer urban space, new attitudes, imaginary projections, characterizing a background scene not functional but also emotional. Every artificially illuminated atmosphere comes perceived as a closed space in the measure in which it comes delimited, like if there were walls, from the darkness surrounding. We are in sensorial, luminous, architecture that can assume a new meant. Our attempt is to communicate to the human mind, to transmit able feelings to realize an unknown space, where the light becomes matter and transparency, shape and colour. For we planners to give a formal answer to the topic mean to give to role to the light. The conjunction of the specific light parameters (intensity, colourhellip;) to the relative ones of urbanism (topography, flows, infrastructurehellip;) and the temporal one's (programs, activitieshellip;) determinates the different enlightening configurations, lightscape(s). The dynamic conception of light therefore describes the urban experience according to the collective use of space (events) or as an interactive support according to the relation and perception of the individual.

The river Arno
The plan has the pretension to introduce a new space that it is born from the intersection of that physicist space and that one gushed from one conceptual reality. The city, as mediatic evolved point, meets the historical city with its stratifications. The encounter comes possible by two elements: the nature and the symbol: the river and the art. The search of that relationship between the city and its river, than in most recent passed had been cracked to the point that the Arno was considered the enemy of Florence, has stimulated the reinterpretation of the period in which it he was fecund and vital. It belongs, in fact, to only puts into effect them culture, the alienor cut that, with dams, bridles and walls (isolating the river from the daily life) has prevented to enjoy a once upon a time common familiarity.
The humanist authors and the witnesses that have made the greatness, and in particular between these those who, at to the court of the Medici, had contributed to the cultural image of rinascimental Florence, have allowed us to focus the search not only in a conservative sense, but towards a reformulation of the historical language for using it in our days. Re-interpreting the classic works with a graphical language, resumed as well as from the vanguards how much from the POP-art and the cyber-art, we have tried to penetrate in the essence of the shape through those instruments of reading that allowed us to not only consider the metaphysics like philosophical science, but also like architectonic study.
The mass-medializzation of the master piece operated from the artists of the POP-art qualifies to us to use the pittorical image like a plasmatic material in slide the flow of the information between a node and the other of the net that has generated the Cyberspace. The Arno becomes a screen, as the mirror behind which the Alice finds an other country of the wonders, while the images of Master piece of the Flonentine art dance in the river. If the River symbolically were the triggering element the transformation, the water becomes the element that technically make possible with the light appearing of the figurations, in fact the same one once nebulizzed represents the ideal material in order to support the soft one to flow of the luminous events obtained by means of combination of projections laser and xeno. In other words the water represents the dielectric in which the electronic flows of it means to you symbolic move to the inside of slabs of that condenser, associate-cultural, that we call city.
The proupose study is a possibility of implementation of quality of the fruibility in the city environment. The historical city became scenery for cultural happenings mediate by the lighting, in the spirit of those kind of ephemeral architecture which had made great Florence in the renaissance. This is also an occasion to maintain alive the memory of those events and artistical production that had made great Florence for the European culture. It is also a new way to look at the global museum, all the building and street in historical city became part of this virtual museum, improving the value of the city it self.
Offering a special fruibility in the city by nite we communicate with the young generations, exortin them with a cultural message given in a modern way very familiar with them.


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