From the first beaten paths of the prehistoric landscape – simple yet already capable of leaving a mark on the territory – to the paved roads of ancient civilizations, the history of mobility shows a progressive structuring of movement spaces in synergy with technical and architectural progress. With the Industrial Revolution and the twentieth century, the development of railways, subways, highways, and airports heightened, along with the increase of speed, the need to separate flows and regulate access. Consequently, the logistical role of intermodal hubs grew, called upon to manage new forms of complexity. The traces inscribed in the territory – linear infrastructures or punctual buildings – underwent a shift in scale that magnified their impact, altering contexts and defining new landscapes. The age of the machine, with new materials, the internal combustion engine, and electricity, transformed the relationship between architecture and technology, opening new imaginaries – as argued by Reyner Banham. Multilevel cities, stratification of flows, tunnels, footbridges, and elevators made infrastructures appear as true monuments. Technology, as in Sant’Elia’s drawings for the Città Nuova (1914), was displayed rather than concealed. Urban visions like Corbett’s sections (1925) or Hilberseimer’s Großstadtarchitektur (1927) evoked a new world. Steel, glass, and mechanical systems became an architectural language.
Beyond these heroic and audacious visions, the spread of infrastructures often followed more prosaic paths, opening a gap between technical solutions and architectural quality.
The Passages call invites us to look again at these places with an intrepid gaze, engaging what Musil called the sense of possibility to unlock their potential for the future city: stations, airports, and service areas as nodes of urban life, architectures that render passage memorable beyond mere engineering functionalism. From a disciplinary perspective, the term “intersection” is, above all, the point where complementary bodies of knowledge meet: where movement, supported by technology, takes architectural form and encounters the ability to create places. The session Over, Under, Architecture opens multiple perspectives, presenting cases where theories, models, imaginaries, and conflicts emerge.
Common to many contributions is the consideration of architecture’s role as a catalyst for urban transformation. Gianluca Piccolo, Luigiemanuele Amabile, and Nino Silva focus on Porta Nolana station in Naples (1972–75, Giulio De Luca), a terminal that anticipated the capacity to link flows with the city. Similarly, Sofia Darbesio observes the transformation of metro stations from simple nodes into multifunctional public spaces. Fabio Santonicola addresses the relationship between large buildings and their contexts, comparing two paradigms: Koolhaas’s Bigness, conceived as an autonomous object, and Hara’s Discrete City, imagined as a porous device able to connect with the urban fabric. Another dichotomy lies between design as technical response and design as spatial opportunity. Filippo Prevedello explores this by rereading car parks – from Melnikov to Herzog & de Meuron – as a typology marked by generous space and adaptability.
The reflection on perceived experience and on the intersection between surface urban life and underground spaces is shared by several contributions. Lan Wei invites us to dwell in transit, seeing Leslie Green’s stations as emotional interfaces beyond the cliché of the non-place. In the same direction, Chloé Druhen Charnaux, analyzing three stations of the Grand Paris Express, highlights the tensions between design vision and real practices of perception and use. Marija Blagojevic examines Belgrade’s modernist passages: conceived to connect the city without disrupting the grid, later degraded and transformed into sites of appropriation. Finally, Basel Beshtawi shifts the focus to the political dimension, raising a question running through many cases: does mobility bring freedom or refined control?
Over, Under, Architecture is then an invitation to confront complexity, shaping layered, efficient, livable mobility spaces. The session seeks to engage with this ambition, opening a shared reflection on the future of the city in motion.
Bibliography
- Banham, R. (1960). Theory and Design in the First Machine Age. London: The Architectural Press.
- Hilberseimer, Ludwig. Groszstadt Architektur. 2. ed. Stuttgart: J. Hoffman, 1978. Print.
- Musil, R. (1957). The Man Without Qualities [orig. Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, 1930–1943]. Turin: Einaudi.
