Time sections, abstract machines

conditions a time-spatial discontinuity in the urban grid, ancient walls casually discovered in a substrate of the contemporary town needs a surplus of information to be understood and interfaced with their current condition. diagrams diverse chronological stages of the urban evolution are mapped on the area, in order to read the historical stratifications as a multiplicity of signs, this abstract approach leads to consider the roman space as guided by metrics, a system of measure superimposed on the landscape, vs. medioeval spatial continuity, where more fluid relations between the same urban elements create a completely different pattern.assemblage (time sections) a surface, automatically displaced from the medioeval diagram, moves along the z axis, the historical stratification direction, intersecting in various, unpredictable, manners a series of paths, these paths start as parallels, allowing an undifferentiated access to the area, and mutate along their developing direction, intertweening and blending each other, linear openings are cut on the surface, virtually connecting the two levels by light, following the roman grid in rhythm and measure. Projected on the lateral wall, the cadence of the vertical and horizontal elements becomes a temporal diagram of the design process.movement time takes part into the process through two kinds of movement: the first one, freezed when reaches the best results, in terms of complexity, is given by the surface intersecting the tubular paths, the second one is represented by multiple routes walking on which the project can be experienced (in absence of any objective, fixed, point of view, movement becomes the only way to understand relations). Thresholds between typical architectural categories (such as inside-outside, object-landscape etc.) are blurred in favour of a more supple condition, another kind of continuity (re)appears, as a new media, between the different historical layers of the city