Transurbance *

During the same years in which Smithson was exploring the empty spaces of the American peripheries, architects were trying to comprehend what was spontaneously growing in the territory before their incredulous eyes. Looking up from their analyses of historical centers, typo-morphological relations, and urban tracings, architects realized that something was happening around them that they had refused to notice, and that eluded all their categories of interpretation. They couldn't understand how a sort of cancer had gotten hold of the city and was destroying it. Around the city something had been born that wasn't city, and which they didn't hesitate to define as “non-city” or “urban chaos,” a general disorder inside which it was impossible to comprehend anything except certain fragments of order randomly juxtaposed in the territory. Some of these fragments had been built by the architects themselves, others by speculators, while others still were the result of intervention originating on a regional, national, or even multinational scale. The vantage point of those who observed this type of chaotic city was located inside the historical city. From this position, the architects approached the thing the way a doctor approaches a patient: It was necessary to cure the cancer, to restore order; what was happening was unacceptable, it was necessary to intervene, re-qualify, to impose quality . At this point it was also noticed that—once again, there beside the historical city, in the “periphery”—there were large empty spaces that were not being utilized, that could lend themselves to large-scale operations of territorial surgery. Given their large scale, they were called urban voids . Design would have to work on these areas and bring new portions of order into the chaos of the periphery: to reconnect and re-compose the fragments, to saturate and suture the voids with new forms of order, often extracted from the quality of the historical city. Even today, many architects approach the cancer of the periphery with these intentions and these operative modes.