Looking at Oswald Mathias Ungers’s work as a system between art and architecture is an opportunity for two different reasons. First of all, the affinity between art and architecture is an interesting point of view for contextualising Ungers's work in the cultural panorama of his time. His voluntary solitude is shattered in his relationship with art, through which he manages to establish fruitful links with the contemporary cultural debate that characterises the artistic environment. On the other hand, Ungers looks at the art world with curious eyes, interpreting it as a complementary element of his work in architecture. This paper seeks to identify one of the common ground between these two worlds, focusing specifically on design work in collaboration with artists. This point of tangency identifies an interstitial space that puts two distinct dimensions into dialogue according to spatial overlaps and visual connections in a stratified system of relationships.

This article examines the city of Qufu, once the state capital of Lu (1042–249 BCE) in today’s Shandong province, China. Qufu is the hometown of Confucius (551–479 BCE), and for sites associated with the Chinese philosopher. It was also the closest example before the Warring States period (475‒221 BCE) following the imperial Chinese city planning principles for an ideal capital prescribed in the Record of Trades in Rituals of Zhou. The Temple of Confucius in Qufu city was constructed in 478 BCE, with its expansive complexes of the Kong Family Mansion and Cemetery, mostly dating from the Ming (1368–1644) and Qing (1644–1911) dynasties. These Three Confucian sites have been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1994, and are key areas in the study, alongside four modern Confucius architecture: Confucius Research Institute, Confucius Cultural Park, Confucius Six Arts City, and Confucius Museum. The paper seeks to understand what aspect of Chinese philosophy is reflected in Confucius architecture. The finding reveals Yin Yang balance and harmony is the basic aesthetic principle guiding the planning and design of Confucius architecture in Qufu city.

This paper explores the transformative role of play in creating inclusive, human-centered urban environments. Drawing on Johan Huizinga’s foundational theory that play is essential to culture and social meaning, it investigates how play can serve as a spatial tool for fostering creativity, connection, and care in the public realm. Through a critical lineage—from Aldo van Eyck’s postwar playgrounds to contemporary participatory installations—this research examines how intergenerational and intercultural play redefines urban design. It considers historical precedents, speculative visions, and recent design interventions—including a studio-led initiative, Urban Salon: Furniture as Intergenerational Playground—to propose adaptable, small-scale strategies for activating underutilized spaces. These interventions highlight how modularity, improvisation, and participatory design can counteract urban isolation and revitalize community. Ultimately, this paper argues that play is not peripheral to the city, but essential to its livability: a civic practice that blurs boundaries between user and environment, and reshapes the built environment into a shared, evolving, and inclusive playground.

The railway system built in the first half of the 20th century pervaded the inland areas of the Italian regions, connecting small towns and favouring their settlement growth. The decommissioning of this heritage has left works and areas in a discarded condition, empty and in oblivion within urban and natural contexts, ready to be the object of circular regeneration, in the design process marked by the terms inheritance, retroactivity and metamorphosis. A process that allows a selection of assets by value character, recognised as archetypes, readaptable, able to redetermine themselves through mutative processes, which change their figurativeness, connection with infrastructures and variation of uses. Their foreshadowing as archetypes, becomes a link with tradition and an expression of its translation, making them inclusive and connected on an architectural and territorial scale, enhancing and reinforcing the peculiarities of the place.

In the context of escalating biodiversity loss and accelerating environmental degradation—where cities are increasingly recognized as key spaces for fostering reciprocal human–nature relationships—this paper explores experiential walking as a tool for examining biodiversity perception in urban environments. The research draws on data collected during an experiential walk conducted in April 2024 in Milan, focusing on two areas: Città Studi, home to the city’s two main university campuses, and Ortica, a culturally and historically rich yet spatially fragmented district. Thirty students walked a west–east transect, crossing diverse urban landscapes and visiting various biodiverse public green spaces. Using questionnaires that included both closed- and open-ended questions, the study recorded participants’ perceptions of biological diversity, its benefits, and the restorative qualities of green spaces. The data were statistically analyzed to identify patterns and factors influencing biodiversity perception. The findings underscore how experiential walking can enhance awareness of urban biodiversity, increase the recognition of the qualities of small natural areas, and foster a deeper connection with nature—ultimately encouraging greater public engagement in biodiversity conservation.

The theoretical constructs developed by Gianugo Polesello in the field of urban studies, which have characterized the research activity of the Gruppo Architettura since the second half of the 20th century, provide a methodological reflection aimed at defining tools and operational categories for urban and territorial planning sub specie architecturæ conceived not as an ideological reconciliation of contradictions, but rather as a unifying logic capable of sustaining conflicts within a unitary construction that assumes the “dialectic of the distinct” as the only possible relationship between irreducible specificities. To revisit these researches also entails questioning, today as then, the “legacy of the Modern” and its reflection in contemporary experience, with intentions that aim not so much at “orthodox” reformist agendas or ideological totalitarianisms, but rather at a “heterodoxy” very attentive to the thought and figures that represent an alternative vision of Modernity. An “other Modernity”, indeed, which, in our view, has its roots in the full acceptance of “partiality” and “conflict” as indispensable conditions of a “design thinking” that does not seek to dissolve multiplicities to overcome contradictions, but rather, to embrace their components as a constitutive principle of a new “idea of space” for the city and its territory.

n ancient Rome, the use of vaulted structures built by using Roman concrete allowed for the construction of high-rise buildings. This architectural influence can be evident in Ostia, the Roman port city. During the first half of the 2nd century C.E., clusters of buildings in Ostia were constructed with barrel vaults and cross vaults, reaching two or more storeys in height. Unlike the residential complexes in Pompeii and Herculaneum, some of the insulae in Ostia could have been reconstructed to have been as high as four storeys. However, these vaulted structures in residential buildings are often overlooked in mainstream research on Roman architectural vaults due to their perceived lack of architectural finesse. This study focuses specifically on the surviving cross vaults within Ostia, aiming to uncover the practical aspects of constructing high-rise buildings in the city. By carefully examining the form of these cross vaults, the study seeks to understand the reality of vaulted structures in the clusters of residential buildings. Extensive three-dimensional data measured by laser scanner of the city block units is utilized to analyze how these cross vaults interacted as a cluster.

The condition of atopy that characterizes the underground strata of the contemporary city is an interesting starting point for exploring the potential of architecture to dig into the past to reappropriate the archaeological spaces by weaving new relationships vertically and horizontally. The excavation is interpreted as a cognitive device for investigating primitive spaces, but also as a design tool for reconnecting them back to the city above, emphasizing the continuity between layers. These issues are investigated with a theoretical-experimental approach, making use of three areas of the city of Naples, the hill of Poggioreale, the Materdei-Sanità districts, and Mount Echia, as demonstrative cases to derive a design methodology for those places where the presence of an archaeological underground, disconnected from the above, constitutes the potential trigger point for an urban overturning. Excavation is interpreted in the three cases as an incision, that is cutting into the ground to give new centrality to the excavated space, as an intercommunicable labyrinth to experiment with hybrid archaeological plots, and as an archaeological introspection, to emphasize the intracorporeal travel into the earth that opens new archaeological narratives, reanimating the dialogue between the two worlds of above and below, which have never been divided.