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Prima edizione
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ALEPPO
A unique city
edited by
Annalucia D’Erchia
Challenges in revitalising
historic cities
Architectural and urban design seminar
ABC PhD Design Workshop
Scientific director
Adalberto Del Bo
Academic Board
Adalberto Del Bo |
Politecnico di MilanoMassimo Ferrari |
Politecnico di MilanoMaria Cristina Loi |
Politecnico di MilanoCristina Pallini |
Politecnico di MilanoAnna Laura Pezzetti |
Politecnico di MilanoLecturer
Lilas Abdulmawla |
Politecnico di MilanoFrancesco Bruno|
Politecnico di MilanoMichele Caja |
Politecnico di MilanoClaudio Chesi |
Politecnico di MilanoArmando Dal Fabbro |
IUAVDevin |
Politecnico di MilanoMassimo Ferrari |
Politecnico di MilanoCecilia Fumagalli |
International University of RabatGiulia Annalinda Neglia|
Politecnico di BariCristina Pallini |
Politecnico di MilanoAnna Laura Pezzetti |
Politecnico di MilanoCameron Rasthi |
Aga Khan Trust for CultureFrancesco Siravo |
Aga Khan Trust for CultureSandra Tonna |
Politecnico di MilanoJurjen van der Tas |
Aga Khan Trust for CultureCritics
Francesco Collotti |
Università degli Studi di FirenzeCarlo Moccia |
Politecnico di BariDesign Team Leader
Michele Caja
Adalberto Del Bo
Massimo Ferrari
Cecilia Fumagalli
Martina Landsberger
Cristina Pallini
Students
Daniele Beacco
Annalucia D’Erchia
Derya Erdim
Giulia Grassi
Jessica Kassis
Flavio Menici
Sara Troncone
Siqui Miao
Hosein Rosaei
Ling Qin
Gor Shahnazaryan
Denislav Sokolov
Promosso da
Index
Adalberto Del Bo
Aleppo: a unique city
Cameron Rasthi
Challenges in revitalising historic cities.
Kabul from destruction to reconstruction
Jurjen van der Tas
AKTC’s socio-economic engagement in Aleppo
2007 – 2011
Francesco Siravo
Assessing War Damages in Old Aleppo.
A Pilot Area Investigation
conducted by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture
Claudio Chesi, Devin, S. Tonna
The Umayyad Minaret.
Original Structural concept
and reconstruction criteria
Lilas Abdulmawla
A history written in stones…
Cristina Pallini
A work of architecture.
The rise of Thessaloniki from Selanik ashes
Cecilia Fumagalli
Tools and Strategies for an Atlas of Urban
Planning in the Historic Cities of the Islamic World
PREFACE
8
18
26
34
44
54
62
70
CONTRIBUTIONS
Michele Caja
The Reconstruction of European City.
The case of Berlin.
Francesco Bruno
The Multan Walled City Experience
Armando Dal Fabbro
with Camilla Donantoni e Anna Fabris
Aleppo Project
Massimo Ferrari
Reconstructing the urban project:
the case of Beirut
Anna Laura Pezzetti
Reconstruction Narratives:
Historical Space, Memory and Nostalgia
Three Modes between Protection and Design
in Chinese Built Heritage Practices
Giulia Annalinda Neglia
Cultural Landscape: The Ancient City of Aleppo
Citadel
Massimo Ferrari,
Annalucia D’Erchia, Gor Shahnazaryan
Historical Residences
Michele Caja, Martina Landsberger,
Cecilia Fumagalli, Ling Qin
Suq
Cristina Pallini
Flavio Menici, Sara Troncone,
Siqui Miao, Hosein Rosaei
PROJECTS
78
86
94
102
111
118
130
134
138
CRITICS
New settlement
Adalberto Del Bo
Daniele Beacco, Denislav Sokolov,
Derya Erdim, Jessica Kassis, Giulia Grassi
Francesco Collotti
Is the presence of the past project forming?
Carlo Moccia
Composing with antiquity
142
146
150
147
Is the presence
of the past
project forming?
Francesco Collotti
Università degli Studi di Firenze149
I
n Frankfurt the right bank of the River Main lies downtown near the hill
where the Cathedral rises. An outpost of Roman origin placed to protect the
ford on the river. The most extraordinary Gothic quarters once standing all
around the cathedral recall the experience of the European city.
The Dom-Römer was shaven to the ground in 1944.
The fire after the bombing destroyed the wooden houses, but left the stone
basements.
Immediately after the war, the remains and the rubble were cataloged and
placed in a museum, as well as being sold by weight to private collectors. Now
the City of Frankfurt has regained the old stones from collectors, finding many
of the red weak sandstone house remains and some pieces of the basements in
black hard basaltlava.
During the post-war period the area was cleaned up and the quarter was
reconstructed in the late Fifties with a large underground parking and public
buildings.
After a long debate, in the recent years the Municipality (owner of the lots)
courageously decided to demolish again the post war buildings and organized
an architectural competition, promoted by Dom Römer Gmbh, a company of
public development.
The old quarter is being resurged due to a meticulous job done by the
Municipality on the plans of the old registers and on the ancient surveys of
the facades. Some houses were rebuilt as they once were, where they once
were. Some other houses have been composed, or recomposed, by a constant
comparison with the old, but without sacrificing the new (among others
architects Hans Kollhoff, Tillmann Wagner, Morger + Dettli, Berndt Albers,
Jordi & Keller, Dreibund Architekten, and Francesco Collotti who is reporting
the experience here).
Building here is re-building without making a copy, but seeking out the old
measure and the proportion of the Gothic town while looking for a new
possibility of warm life between these walls.
Building here is re-building, giving to experience of the city a slower tempo.
Here makes sense talking about the resistance of the architecture, anyway
contrasting the memory loss so often affecting Europe now (and not only
Europe, indeed).
The quarter is crossed by the ancient route where the royal crowing procession
was performed, in direction of the cathedral. A small altitude gap, not
far from an high step, still marking the topography in front of the Schirn
Exhibition Centre, the civic hall for contemporary art. For this place, the old
Krönungsweg, we built a monumental pergola in full stone blocks, properly
reinforced and tensioned, cut in the red veined sandstone from the Main valley
and rooted to the ground by black basaltic lava blocks.
The ancient route once lost has been rediscovered, not by reconstructing the
old facades, but recomposing the sequence as a backstage. Attempting to
return its lost identity (both the projects, house M34 and pergola, with Anna
Is the presence of the past project forming?151
Worzewski, Valentina Fantin, Ilaria Corrocher, Serena Acciai, the pergola also
with PAS Jourdan & Müller + Steinhauser).
The measurements, proportions and details of the pergola stem from our basic
survey of the nearby cathedral. The ancient existing stone being the project
construction material.
The challenge with the past is direct, obliged, site-specific based. For centuries,
new buildings have been built on the ruins and foundations of previous works,
using these materials in various ways. Sometimes for so called spoliatio,
redeploying trabeations and tombstones in the foundations of Byzantine or
medieval walls. The ancient stones are used as building material or as ready
made platforms. All around the Mediterranean here is the experience of
Naples, Arles, Nîmes, Milan, Ravenna, Split, Zadar, Thessalonica, Byzance/
Constantinople/Istanbul, Amman, Aleppo, Alessandria.
We’re interested in the use of these fragments as construction material for the
architectural project.
Is building not far from re-building?
Buildings such as the Orsini Palace by architect Baldassarre Peruzzi, built in
Rome on the Theater of Marcellus, or the Cathedral of Syracuse, in Sicily, where
the church was built in the cell of the previous Doric ellenistic temple, all these
examples demonstrate the use of a building concept not far from rebuilding.
Contaminated, processed, amplified, measured and reconstructed or re-used in
a second life, the classical and late classical ruins are the material on which the
landscape and the town is built in the following centuries.
Is the presence of the past project forming?
They seem to be hardship but are they in deed chances?
In architecture, indeed, fast advances and antique gestures go hand in hand,
the continuity is a condition, not a choice. We are not interested in embalming
the past. We prefer to recognise its ability to accept the transformation
without denying it.
What is the relationship between old and new, which continuity, at what
distance?
These questions would be able to go beyond the absolute gap between pure
restoration and anything-goes-project, in which the contemporary architectural
debate seems to be confused.
Is it still possible to think of a second life for old buildings?
How to use the old buildings or how to use the past to build new ones?
And where is the border between conservation and embalming?
Our attitude to re-read the urban phenomena and sort through the project is
maybe forced to survive in fragments.
For fragments of plans, of architecture, of ideas, lives the contemporary city
(Aldo Rossi).
For fragments we can still evoke tasks often forgotten for this metier, obliging
us to continue to build-up the city and landscape, relocating it with memory
projection, as transfigured it may be.
156
The authors
Adalberto Del Bo
after classical studies graduated at the Politecnico di Milano School of Architecture where he is full Professor in Architectural and Urban Design and former Deputy Dean..He had lectured in many countries and is author of publications on theoretical and practical aspects of arhi-tectural and urban design on which he organized exhibitions and chaired international conferences. Author of public buildings, from 2014 to 2017 he has been Vice-president of the European Association for Architectural Education.Cameron Rashti
is an architect and project manager with extensive project experience on major projects in North America, Europe and the Middle East. He is a graduate of Dartmouth College, holds professional architectural degrees from Pratt Institute and Columbia University, and is a registered architect in the USA and the UK. He joined the Geneva-based Historic Cities Programme within the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in 1994 as Deputy Director, following his association as Vice President of Perkins and Will International managing projects in Canary Wharf and other sites in London and Europe. Within HCP, he was (among other tasks) responsible for the implementation of the Azhar Park project.Jurien Van Der Tas
is deputy director of the Historic Cities Programme of the Aga Khan Trust for Culture (AKTC). Before taking up this position in 2003, he was director of policy and program-ming for the Aga Khan Foundation UK. Between 1991 and 2002, he worked at Oxfam Novib as pro-gramme officer for local development initiatives in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh and the former So-viet Central Asia. In the late 1980s, he was agricultural advisor to the project planning unit of the Federal Bank for Cooperatives in Pakistan. Van der Tas has an MSc in tropical agricultural development from the University of Reading, UK.Francesco Siravo
is an Italian architect specialised in historic preservation and town plan-ning. Since I99I he has worked for the Historic Cities Support Programme of the Aga Khan Trust for Cul-ture, with projects in Zanzibar, Cairo, Samarkand and Mostar. Previous work includes the preparation of plans for the historical areas of Rome and Urbino, Italy, and for the old town of Lamu, Kenya, as well as consultancies for UNESCO and ICCROM. He has written books, articles and papers on various architectur-al conservation and town planning subjects, including “Zanzibar: A Plan for the Historic StoneTown” (1996) and “Planning Lamu: Conservation of an East African Seaport” (1986).
Claudio Chesi
is a Professor of Civil Engineering at Politecnico di Milano. His main research interest is in earthquake engineering, with special reference to problems related to the preservation of the monumental heritage. In connection to this specific interest, his teaching activity mainly concerns the course of Earthquake resistant design in the School of Engineering and his cooperation to the doctorate program in Preservation of the Architectural Heritage in the School of Architecture.Sandra Tonna
is an architect and a research doctor in Conservation of Architectural Heri-tage. In the field of conservation she is active in both professional works and academic research programs on historical buildings. She is currently involved in a few projects, dealing with the seismic vulnerability analysis of schools buildings, at the University of Parma, and with seismic-proof solutions in historic build-ings, at Politecnico di Milano and the Technical University of Athens.Devin
i
s a civil engineer with major in structures. He got a Bachelor of Science in Civil Engi-neering at the University of Indonesia, Depok (Indonesia) and a Master in Civil EngiEngi-neering at Politecnico di Milano, where he also attended the Alta Scuola Politecnica. He has been a Junior Structural Engineer at Royal HaskoningDHV (Indonesia) for a couple of years. In his Master thesis he has developed a special expertise in the analysis of the seismic vulnerability of masonry minaret structures.157
Lilas Abdulmawla
is Syrian architect who was born and lived in Damascus in which has at-tended and obtained her B.Sc. at Damascus University Faculty of Architecture, Syria in 2014. Obtained her M.Sc. in Architecture at Politecnico di Milano, Italy in 2017. Followed an internship at Wilmotte & Associés in Nice, France in 2018. Currently, she is a PhD Candidate at Politecnico di Milano, Preservation of the Ar-chitectural Heritage, Department of Architecture and Urban Studies (DASTU) with interdisciplinary PhD grant with Architecture, Built Environment and Construction Engineering Department (ABC).Research field: Critical Reconstruction of Historical Cities, The case of Aleppo Cultural HeritageCristina Pallini
Architect (Politecnico di Milano, 1990), PhD in Architectural Composition (IUAV Venice, 2001). Associate Professor at the Department of Architecture Built Environment and Con-struction Engineering, Politecnico di Milano. Teaching Architectural Design Studio at the School of Archi-tecture Urban Planning Construction Engineering AUIC, Politecnico di Milano.Her research on the relationship between architectural design, settlement dynamics and urban change has been funded by Italian and foreign institutions, including AKPIA @ MIT (2004), the Onassis Founda-tion (2006), Newcastle University (SALP, 2016). She has collaborated in EU-funded research (ARCHING, DeMuCiv). PI in PUMAH Planning, Urban Management and Heritage (2012-16) and MODSCAPES Modern-ist reinventions of the rural landscape (2016-19).
Cecilia Fumagalli
graduated in Architecture at Politecnico di Milano. In 2017, she obtained her PhD degree from Politecnico di Milano with a thesis entitled “Transformation as a Tool for Conserva-tion. Cities of the Islamic World and Heritage Insitutions in the Field”. She is currently Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture of the International University of Rabat (Morocco), where she teaches and carries out researches in the fields related to architecture and urban planning in the Islamic world.Michele Caja
is Associate Professor in Architectural and Urban Composition at Politecni-co di Milano, AUIC School-ABC Department. Doctorate in Architectural Composition at IUAV in Venice (2005). Among other universities where he did teaching activities: ETH Zürich, Faculty “Aldo Rossi” Cese-na; FHP Potsdam.His research focuses on the relationship between theory and contemporary design, referring in particular to the Italian and German sphere
Francesco Bruno
,
Architect Ph.D., is an Adjunct Professor of Architectural Design Studio I at the School of Architecture Urban Planning Construction Engineering of the Politecnico di Milano and Project Director of the Multan Walled City Initiative on account of Fondazione Politecnico di Milano. He is author of several issues and articles focusing on architectural composition and urban planning. Beside his research activities, he is a designer of several architectural proposals and has taken part in numerous national and international architectural competitions.Armando Dal Fabbro
He teaches architectural and urban composition in the Department of Architecture Building Conservation at IUAV. Since 2001 he has been a member of the Council of the Doctoral School in Architectural Composition. He is visiting professor at various foreign universities and he is part of the Scientific Committee of several architectural series.The didactic and scientific activities relate to the design of architecture as research. A personal theoreti-cal research on composition, on the themes of place and architecture, the relationship between form and figuration, the design of the new in relation to the ancient.
He takes part in international design competitions and collective exhibitions. He received the Grand Prix of the 6th International Architecture Biennale in Krakow and the Mention of Honor and the Bene Meren-tibus Medal of the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Krakow.
158
Massimo Ferrari
i
s an architect and Associate Professor of Architectural and Urban Com-position at Politecnico di Milano. He has belonged to «Casabella» magazine editorial board and he has been part of the Architecture Manuals Collection Scientific Committee by MUP Editore Parma and Man-tovArchitettura Scientific Committee by Corraini Edizioni. He has edited several publications on architec-ture and art and several exhibitions. He was a speaker in national and international conventions. His re-search concerns architectural design and the relationship between shape and structure.Laura A Pezzetti
M. Arch PhD, is professor of Architectural Design and Urban Composition at Politecnico di Milano, where she also serves as PhD board and thesis supervisor. She is responsible for International Exchanges and Double Master Degrees with some Chinese Universities and has directed the yearly ‘Heritage-Led Design Workshop’ in Xi’an (China) since 2015. She conducts research and design ac-tivities in Italy and China focussed on architecture, urban project and related theoretical issues, with spe-cific reference to historic urban and rural landscape, redevelopment of contexts in transformation, role of public buildings and spaces. Her theoretical research and design have been published internationally and discussed in conferences and exhibitionsGiulia Annalinda Neglia
is Assistant Professor in Landscape Architecture at the Depart-ment ICAR of the Polytechnic University of Bari. She received her Ph.D. in Architectural Design for Medi-terranean Countries from Polytechnic University of Bari in 2003 and a postdoctoral fellowship at the Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture at MIT in 2004.An author of four monographs on Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cities and landscapes and more than 100 articles and essays, her interest spans from analytical work to sustainable design for landscape recovery and regeneration.
Francesco Collotti
architect PhD full professor at University of Firenze, visiting at ETHZ, TU Dortmund, BAires, Jinan CHN. Activity as link between research, teaching, building (sustainable, site specific, responsible architecture). Research and pilot-projects are focusing the Mediterranean area from to Europe, from Alps to Middle/Near East (now working in Italy, Jordan, Oman, Turkey and Germany). Contributions intl. arch. reviews (Werk, Domus, Casabella, Archi). Since 2016 professor also at EMADU Ecole Euromed d’Architecture, de Design et d’Urbanisme/Euromed University of Fès - Université Eu-roméditerranéenne de Fès.Carlo Moccia
is full professor of Architectural and Urban Design at Politecnico di Bari, where he coordinates the PhD in “Planning for Heritage”. The theoretical reflection is accompanied by a constant practice of architectural design. His projects are collected in the monographs Forme di case (Lib-ria, 2012) and Carlo Moccia. Architectures 2000/2010 (Aion Edizioni, 2012). In 2006 he was awarded with the Leone di Pietra at the 10th Biennale di Venezia International Architecture Exhibition.159
New settlement project
Adalberto Del Bo full professor at Politecnico di Milano - Architectural Composition
Daniele Beacco PhD candidate in Architecture, Built environment and Construction engineering Derya Erdim PhD candidate in Architecture, Built environment and Construction engineering Denislav Sokolov Master student
Jessica Kassis Master student
Giulia Grassi PhD candidate in Architecture, Built environment and Construction engineering
Suq project
Cristina Pallini Associate professor at Politecnico di Milano - Architectural Composition Flavio Menici PhD candidate in Architecture, Built environment and Construction engineering Sara Troncone PhD candidate in Architecture, Built environment and Construction engineering Siqui Miao PhD candidate in Architecture, Built environment and Construction engineering Hosein Rosaei PhD candidate in Architecture, Built environment and
Construction engineering
Historical Residences project
Michele Caja Associate professor at Politecnico di Milano - Architectural Composition
Martina Landsberger Associate professor at Politecnico di Milano - Architectural Composition Cecilia Fumagalli Assistant Professor at the School of Architecture of
the International University of Rabat (Morocco)
Ling Qin PhD candidate in Architecture, Built environment and Construction engineering
Citadel project
Massimo Ferrari Associate professor at Politecnico di Milano - Architectural Composition Annalucia D’Erchia PhD candidate in Architecture, Built environment and
Construction engineering
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