New sustainable a tophographies for a design code

Like all sensitive areas Skofja Loka needs a new sustainable topography, between change and permanence of landscape signs, a redesign of places which can follow the traces of a new site, a new environmental structure. The designs proposed here go in this direction and, like other tentative experiences of “sustainability sensitive urban design”, show that “architectural traces exist in the ruins scattered across rural and urban landscapes - they only wait to be encoded” (1). A new settling practice which recycles what can be still meaningful to the landscape and what can become measure for the territory, where “recycling urban spaces and fabrics is necessarily context-specific and adaptive (…) A strategy oriented to improve environmental and landscape qualities in the city and, on the other hand, to erode the density of metropolitan functions” (2). In this new “topography”, networks and public space become measure of value, new design references and take on the nature of eco-sustainability every time places are reconfigured, typological aggregations defined (a), disused spaces given back identity (b) and future collective urban scenarios pictured (c). The outcome of this new landscape, measured against territorial infrastructures, is sustainability and energy at the same time, which express themselves through “various symbolic and configurative potentials, drawn from present identities, which involve different artificial and natural components with original aesthetic values (…)” (3).