Facies: Urban Architectures

Facies refers to the ability of architecture to enable, by means of its outward appearance, interaction between the space occupied by the building and the setting within which it is found.

Architecture, Gio Ponti argues, is made to be looked at, because through the facades of architecture is a public landscape. The facades are the street walls and a city is made of streets.

Restoring the facade to the world of meaning requires shifting the role of the building from object to subject, elevating it beyond the exclusive need to meet a set of requirements. However, architecture, to be recognised as such, shouldn't represent, signify, or symbolise something other than itself, but provide a process generating form that organises and builds its own assumptions within disciplinary autonomy. The world of forms thus refers to the wealth of architectural knowledge from which it draws nourishment and thanks to which it generates new forms.