Kenzo Tange and the ‘space of communication’: the never achieved project for the accessibility of the old town of Spoleto in Italy

Abstract

ABSTRACT Kenzo Tange was deeply interested in the contemporary architectural culture and eager to incorporate, in his own formal register, typical traditional expressions. In his work, the structure of the city and the buildings is reconsidered as a ‘space of communications’, rich in symbolic values, where every form can have several meanings, and therefore have an impact on the compositional, constructive and functional approach. The plans he designed for Tokyo, Skopje and the Italian directional centres, show the fluid, technological and ever-changing dynamic that Tange experienced in 1987 in the Umbrian city of Spoleto, where he was called to submit a project to improve the urban accessibility for the old town. In Spoleto, he combined technological equipment, mechanised routes on electric sidewalks placed on the surface, in close contact with the city’s historical buildings, with particular attention to the conservation of all the stratified architecture of the historic city centre. The dialectic between the tradition and the creation, i.e. between the trend of a traditional repetition of forms and their overcoming, offers a gateway by which it’s possible to appreciate the genius of the architect and also to understand the demands of conservation from the perspective of innovation.