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Abstract:

From Aldo Van Eyck’s attention to thresholds, Milos Bobic’s idea of urban interfaces, to Gordon Matta-Clark’s sliced territories or Peter Rowe’s Middle Landscape, in-between spaces have been an important topic in architectural or urban debates. In many cases, intermediate spaces are presented as de facto interesting spaces, as if they automatically guarantee urban qualities, without unveiling the reasons for it. In other discourses, they are approached as blurry intermittent spaces, defined as grey zones (the semi-public, semi-private approach), as unsharp areas, sandwiched in between more important or more easily definable spaces. Apart from the possible qualities in-between spaces may obtain, the main focus should be however on the way these spaces are defined, by seeing them as part of a bigger system of adjacent spaces and programs. The Streetscape Territories Research Project tries to explore this subject by analysing or designing a series of urban projects and by trying to explore the ways these projects, and their constituting in-between spaces, relate to the street as part of a depth configuration. This paper studies how these buildings, properties, streets or areas are organised territorially and how they define contemporary streetscapes in multiple ways.