URBAN UP | UNIPOL, DE CASTILLIA 23 - An installation that, through a ‘sideways gaze’ at the stars, presents a reflection on the protection of air quality in urban design and in the management policy of large cities
“The vertical sky. Magrittian clouds rotated 90 degrees. The building in blue light. The clouds like flying hot air balloons. They change color. Clouds repositionable! Horizontally.”
The caption of one of the preliminary sketches of Studio Azzurro’s project Il Respiro dell’Aria, which transforms the De Castillia 23 building into a large vertical sky of 4,000 square meters, speaks of the “ancient practice of astronomers of observe the stars with a sideways gaze.”
The theme proposed by Urban Up | Unipol – the protection of air quality in urban design and the management policy of large cities – translates into a mode of observation that favors the perimetric part of the eye, which is least stressed by everyday use and therefore most sensitive.
But above all, it evokes “a suggestion of laterality that is also transversality and crossing”: a poetic sky “in the spirit of Magritte” to be read as a message on the way city skies should be. Because “the present and future of those who live in them depend on the way the city breathes.”
