Utility of urban morphology studies for the design process: some educational experiences

Enhancing, within the educational teaching of architectural design, the strong continuity between the typological evolution of the built organism and the building to be designed (Petruccioli, 1998) can greatly improve the architectural design process. From the territorial scale, to the scale of the urban tissues, the understanding of the coherence of paths and settlement patterns within a given site morphology, is the prerequisite for the proper design of the built organism. The paper will illustrate some case studies, in Latium, Rome and Cyprus, focused on the knotting process (Strappa, 2013) and the Muratorian design method (Maretto, 2013), underlining the strong continuity (Whitehand, 2012) between the Conzenian approach and the Italian School of Urban Morphology (Marzot, 2002). From the form of the site and the diachronic evolution of settlement patterns, it is possible to infer the transformation to propose with the contemporary design. The territorial scale is therefore the specific methodological base for the full understanding of the scalar properties, verifiable within other scales, such as the urban organism scale, the urban tissue scale, and the built organism scale. (Cataldi, Maffei, Vaccaro, 2002)