Rethinking cities to make them an ideal place to live adapted to climate and social changes, is a major challenge for architects. Hope City in Ghana and Neom in Saudi Arabia are futuristic cities that open the debate on what urbanization should look like in the decades to come. Interview with Paolo Brescia, founder of Open Building Research.
The ideal city is an eternal quest, but one that remains highly topical. There are many examples, but it is difficult not to mention the works attributed to the famous architect, philosopher, mathematician and painter Leon Battista Alberti, which date back to the middle of the 15th century. The first great theorist of perspective, his works relate the importance of thinking about the city, as in his Descriptio Urbis Romae or his treatise on the art of building, the De re aedificatoria. At that time, it was important to combine rationality and functionality. Back then, Rome had 50,000 inhabitants, Siena had 15,000, nothing like the 37 million inhabitants of Tokyo today. Now 54% of the world's population lives in urban areas, and by 2030, up to 2 billion people will be living in cities, with the challenge of becoming sustainable and smart.
The architect Paolo Brescia is among one of the architects to participate today in the thought-process of an ideal city of the future. After working for Renzo Piano, he founded in 2000 with Tommaso Principi the OBR (Open Building Research), which deals with urban design and new ways of living. Active in Milan, New York, Mumbai, Beijing, Istanbul and Accra, OBR has completed, for example, the Milanofiori residential complex, the Lehariya project in Jaipur, India, and is currently completing the Casa della Vela project in Genoa, Italy.
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Already in 2013, in Accra, Ghana, one of his projects, the Hope City (acronym for Home Office People Environment), confronts an urban ideal with local realities. Commissioned by the RLG Group in collaboration with the Ghanaian government, the architectural project conceived as a vertical city composed of towers connected by a system of bridges at different heights, is thought to cover 400 hectares, accommodate 65,000 inhabitants and 85,000 workers, with the ambition of becoming the most innovative African ICT (Information and Communication Technology) city, bringing together urbanism and business, in a sustainable project that respects local identity. The planned investment is over 5 billion dollars. Luxury Tribune interviewed in exclusivity the architect Paolo Brescia.
What does joining tradition and innovation together mean today, especially in Africa, which is undergoing profound changes?
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