Le poleis greche affacciate sul Meandro. Riflessioni sui luoghi dell’antico

Abstract

The research collected here is presented as an investigation into the distinctive and identifying characteristics of Greek-founded poleis, with the title and subtitle intended as reading coordinates rather than fixed hierarchies. Through a constant dialogue between theoretical reflection and formal investigation, the study focuses on certain invariants of the Greek urban fabric and, drawing on operational categories, identifies the multiple values that have given continuity and permanence to architecture throughout its historical development. The analysis develops along two complementary axes, geographical and chronological, and extends from Sicily to Greece and the coasts of Asia Minor: the selected cities serve as sites of investigation to verify the proposed conceptual trajectories. This volume is part of the ALTERsCITY series and aims to recover the “elsewhere” as a category of design, a field of urban reinvention capable of going beyond mere marginality. The investigation focuses on ancient extra-urban cities and their traces, understood not as isolated relics but as polarities capable of reconfiguring the geography of the territory and reactivating lost urban presences. Through the project, understood as a critical practice and morphological reading tool, the study shows how it is possible to recompose the settlement structure, restore perceptible hierarchies and connections, and reintegrate these poles into the contemporary territorial order. In this way, the project rigorously mediates between memory and renewal and proposes forms of intervention that make urban relationships intelligible once again. Particular attention is paid to the Meandrian poleis – Priene, Miletus and Magnesia on the Meander – places where logos, rational thought, has historically consolidated itself as an organising principle of living. It is here that the impulses of the Greek men of Ionia are rooted, the continuous striving for beauty and the vigorous vital energy eager to assert their magnificence, their conception of the world and the continuous effort to inhabit it with rational thought. It is precisely these cities that are examined for their extraordinary ability to translate, in time and space, the path of the civil experience of city-states into an urban form. Faced with the state of ruin that obscures the system of civil values and makes it difficult to recognise cities as “societies” of poleis, structured in constellations of closed entities inscribed in the chōra, the research adopts an architectural practice centred on design and planning. Through an architectural practice aimed at highlighting the urban scheme underlying the ancient places, the study explains compositional principles, scales and modules – i.e. reasons, measurements and formal research – aimed at restoring form and comprehensibility to the Greek poleis overlooking the Meander