N°2 | 2007 ROUNDABOUTS

A road-shape, or rather, crossroads-shape, is becoming increasingly common in the contemporary urban landscape: these are roundabouts, devices which have changed driving habits and the quality of traffic circulation. Their extraordinary contemporary fortune is to be explained by their attraction as a device which is able to impose safer and better-flowing trajectories compared with the traditional crossroads. However, they frequently acquire a relevance, as a result of the particular architectural considerations underlying them, which places them within a more general context; that of the research currently under way regarding areas of mobility, understood as fundamental elements in the construction and qualification of the city and its landscape

Numerous contemporary projects testify effectively to a change of sensibility concerning road infrastructures. These are no longer seen as technical devices extraneous to the form of the city and the territory they cross. They therefore take their ideal place amongst the numerous projects and developments that are part of urban tradition.

A journey back through time which takes as its starting point certain well-known renaissance studies. It reveals, in fact, how the urban necessity for an architectural definition of space takes precedence over technical and functional considerations of orderly vehicle movement. By acting as an abstract formal principle which imposes its own logic on the definition of reality, this urban need has brought about the discovery of new forms of regularity.

INDEX

ROUNDABOUTS

Architectural forms for areas of mobility

Arriola&Fiol, PLAÇA DE LES GLÒRIES CATALANES, Barcelona, 1989-1992

Latz + Partner, EUROPEAN CITY OF LUXEMBOURG, Plateau De Kirchberg, 1990-2005

LABYRINTH  LINEARITY

José Luis Daroca, Pilar Mencía, Parc Alborán. El Toyo, Almería, 2003-2005