This thesis takes its steps from this document. Not as historical inquiry, though, but rather as a critical review based on the assumption that site specific manifestos in general - and The City in the City in particular - could still constitute a significant tool to trace design narratives today. The exercise here is that of rewriting the City in the City by keeping its fundamental framework, scrolling through its eleven thesis in search of continuity, but simultaneously putting in discussion its ideological background and all those assumptions and theories that don’t seem to be valuable anymore.

As The City in the City triggered both the metropolitan and the architectural scale, so does this thesis. While the first part is a discussion of the manifesto itself and delineates a scenario for Berlin, the second part of the work focuses on the architectural scale and it constitutes of a research on the typological level. If in 1977 Ungers proposed the urban villa as a possible “architectural tool’,’ so the objective of this research is to find an urban typology that could be appropriate to the requirements of the contemporary city and that, in this case, is based on the density and complexity of the Berlin Block.

This work is an experiment in terms of procedure and an exploration of the logic behind a project. It begins with the assumption that some documents within the discipline could still be source of teaching and an active instrument to change the ways in which we look at the practice of architecture. This doesn’t mean transforming these tools into venerable relics and segregate them in the autonomous world of architecture, though, but it rather means forcing them to face reality, testing their potential on the contemporary city, on contemporary society, on the contemporary way of living.