Beyond the Port City

FOREWORD
Oltre.
Metabolisms at the
City/Port Border
Carmen Andriani is an
architect, full professor
of architectural and
urban design at the
dAD, Polytechnic
School of Genoa
since 2014 and at the
University of Chieti-
Pescara (1992–2014).
She deals with complex
projects, in particular
abandoned industrial
heritage sites, transformations
of port
areas, relationships
between infrastructure
and landscape, and
regeneration of fragile
territories in the
Mediterranean area.
Being a member of
numerous scientific
committees, she has
been visiting professor
and guest critic at
various schools
including Waterloo
University in Canada,
Faculty of Architecture
of the Universidad de
la República (UdelaR),
Tongji University,
Cornell University in
Rome, and Florida
International University.
Her writings and
projects are published
in numerous catalogs
and magazines. Invited
to various editions of
the Milan Triennale and
the Venice Biennale,
she curated the volume
Patrimonio e Abitare
(2010). In recent years,
Andriani has been
scientific director of
research agreed with
the port authorities
and municipalities. In
2014, she founded the
Coastal Design Lab, an
integrated architecture
and urban planning
project of the master
degree course, dAD
UniGE, working on the
complex and inclusive
design of the coastline
(costaldesignlab.
wordpress.com).
Carmen Andriani
Oltre means beyond or on the other side. If you go back to the Sanskrit
prefix “ut,” root of the Latin etymology “ultra,” it also means outside.
The immediate meaning of the word is therefore that of going beyond one’s
real or conceptual sphere. Going beyond a field also means going beyond
a limit, entering an unregulated, ambiguous, uncertain, and, in some ways,
indecipherable zone.
“Out There: Architecture Beyond Building,” for example, was the motto
of an edition of the Venice Biennale 1 where, through this title, a shift in the
terms became clear: affirming that architecture was beyond the building or
that it could be learned from sectors external to those within the discipline
denounced the insufficiency of traditional design tools and at the same time
encouraged experimental and visionary models.
Beyond the Port City (Oltre la città portuale), the title of this book and
the result of a doctoral research project, describes the going beyond the field
and at the same time the exploration of a current, urgent, and highly debated
topic: the interface between city and port. It is an ambiguous state between
urbanity and portuality, an ancient dichotomy to be understood as the two
sides of the same coin, a residual field with unclear contours and a fluid and
interstitial breadth, an exemplary site of the postmodern project.
The nature of these areas has to do, first and foremost, with the decommissioning
process. We could say that it is the articulation — on the waterfront,
whether that of the sea or a river — of a phenomenon that marked the
transition from the industrial to the post-industrial era in the past decades of
the short century and the structural erosion of an economic, social, and thus
also territorial, organizational system. When, as early as the 1960s, entire
production-based, industrial, and logistical ensembles were expelled from
14 Beyond the Port City
FOREWORD