ARCHITETTURE DELLA CITTÀ PORTUALE CONTEMPORANEA. COMPOSIZIONI IBRIDE ED ECCEZIONALI CONTESTI

As mobile interfaces between land and water, port cities operate according to a dual nature: the terrestrial one, linked to the building and the possession and defense of land, and the marine one, connected to movement, discovery and exchange across the seas. Port cities have been landings and emporia but, following global technological-commercial evolutions, in recent decades they have turned into complex hinges to foster the emergence of gateway ports and to innervate the vast territories of ocean traffic with the overall logistics system. Since the Nineteenth century and with greater intensity and rigor in the Twentieth century, the architecture of port cities has been shaped according to the rules of the trade; this has conditioned its structural and formal composition. Dealing with examples of industrial architecture, not necessarily related to the port, in Space of Production: Projects and Essays on Rationality, Atmosphere, and Expression in the Industrial Building, architect Jeanette Kuo underlined how factory buildings were extraordinary test-beds for Nineteenth- and Twentieth-century building experiments. Muses for design theory and practice, factory architectures are at the origin of some of the purest products of integrated design, combining engineering, design language and performance in the articulation of the built environment. Transferred to ports, these experiments have led to the consolidation of a new typology of port-city architectures (i.e. typical of the port city) that manifests itself through a widespread homogeneity of building characteristics. If this typology is immediately recognizable in the port buildings of the last century – among the most widespread, bulk silos, warehouses, hangars, tanks but also maritime stations, freight cranes, dry docks and transbordeur bridges – in the contemporary framework it can still be traced in that complex of operational artefacts that are linked by their location, i.e. erected on the border between the city and the port and activated through ports technological evolution in the mid-Twentieth century, such as the decommissioning and subsequent reconversion of their structures. Huge and functional creatures, fragments of a certain, third dimension. This essay deals with the contemporary design of port-city architectures by selecting a repertoire of hybrid compositional processes concerning their functional, formal, structural and typological transformation. Placed temporally in the last twenty years, the selected projects concern three port artefacts that have undergone a process of radical alteration: the former Kraanspoor crane way in Amsterdam NDSM shipyards, the massive Kaispeicher A brick shed in Hamburg and the twin Frøsilo silos in Copenhagen. Although today deprived of their original function, these artefacts are not limited to being constitutive elements of places but are themselves exceptional contexts in which compositional action intervenes, emphasizing and altering, or borrowing or even over- turning roles, forms, proportions and codes.