City Walls Recovery Plan, Pisa

Description

Designed by Massimo Carmassi and formalised in 1998 after nearly three decades of surveys and studies, Medieval Walls Recovery Plan, Pisa is not limited to the restoration of the city walls themselves, but addresses the much larger urban field defined by their presence. The project grows out of a long research programme carried out especially during the years of the Ufficio Progetti of the Municipality of Pisa, when a vast body of measured drawings of the walls and adjoining areas was produced with the involvement of students and young architects. The walls are understood as the trace of a broad civic territory occupied by arsenals, churches, convents, barracks, industrial remains, open land and fragments of infrastructure, whose recovery could radically transform the image and functioning of the city. The 1998 proposal therefore works on many levels at once: conservative restoration of walls and monuments; removal of incongruous buildings and vegetation that conceal the fortifications; recovery of canals, moats and embankments; reorganisation of traffic and parking; reconstruction or reinterpretation of missing urban edges; insertion of new public and commercial buildings where necessary; and formation of a continuous pedestrian system able to reconnect the Duomo, the western wall, the Cittadella, the Arno and the southern sectors of the city. The aim is not to isolate the monument, but to restore the full visibility of the walls and transform them into a continuous public structure of green spaces, monuments and civic routes. One of the most important episodes within this larger corpus is the Florentine Fortress / Giardino Scotto at the south-eastern vertex of the walls. Here the project combines restoration of the Sangallo fortress with a broader urban and landscape reorganisation. The road cutting through the eastern corner of the fortress is displaced outside the monument and restricted to pedestrians at the critical edge; the moat around the central fortified core is re-established; the foundations of the demolished southern ear are brought back to light; a ring of public routes on two levels allows the whole complex to be perceived again; the northern riverside front is completed through the reconstruction of ruined volumes; and the western embankment of the former piaggione del grano is reorganised through new buildings, a long square, panoramic walks and connections down to the moat. The project also integrates the garden, access structures, water and public use, showing how restoration, urban repair and contemporary insertion belong here to a single strategy. The documents also make clear that this masterplan was both strategic and unevenly developed by intention: some parts were already preceded by concrete interventions begun in the late 1970s and 1980s, while many other sections remained at proposal stage. After the 1999 exhibition at Palazzo Lanfranchi, and despite later works carried out by others on parts of the walls, the structural ambitions of the original project were not pursued as a coherent whole. This reinforces the reading of the scheme as a major civic and disciplinary statement on Pisa rather than as a single fully executed commission.