Towards an Architectural Proxemics: Glauco Gresleri and the Villaggio Pilastro in Bologna

Abstract

In 1960 the Istituto Autonomo Case Popolari (IACP) in Bologna commissioned to Glauco Gresleri, Giorgio Trebbi, Francesco Santini and Giorgio Brighetti the project of an urban plan for a very large and suburban area of Bologna, the so-called villaggio Pilastro. Only part of it will be built. The proposal was paradigmatic of Gresleri's planning thought, which had always conceived architecture in a continuous relationship between what is empy and what is built, to create spaces where the life of the community takes place. This contribution intends to focus on how this principle was declined in both urban planning and architectural form, in the Pilastro district case. Together with the other designers, Gresleri in fact drew a fragment of cities in which the settlement principle was characterised by a careful and varied arrangement of residential and public buildings, able to generate spaces in which city life could have developed with greater intensity. This paper studies the particular attention and ability of Gresleri in addressing the issue of public space outside of the specificity of housing, creating urban environments in which the community can live a proper life: spaces whose quality aimed at allowing the greatest number of possible interactions between people and their environment. In addition to the urban project, he designed and realised one of the first residential buildings in the Pilastro. The interest and care for the external voids inevitably led to a design of the buildings and their mutual arrangement: the staircases became pivots between the lots of the building that could freely unwind to generate always different open spaces for social life.