The Site-Specific Manifestos: a Precise Form of Utopia

As inherent part of modernity, the notion of the metropolis and fragmentation has always been closely connected from the first . From Georg Simmel, who intended the metropolis in terms of flows and fragmentation, to Adorno (1970), that highlighted the distance between modernity and the idea of harmonic aesthetic completion, the juxtaposition, accumulation, or succession of fragments has been intended as an intimate quality of the modern metropolis able to interpret its complex and chaotic composition. A ride through the contemporary territory discloses strange juxtapositions of wealth and poverty, of highly productive areas and abandoned spaces, places of pleasure and places of work. The differences and the contrasts appear gradually more evident; the pieces, of which the territory is composed, seem to have lost their context, appear hardly ascribable to a single unitary figure, they are taking distance from their surroundings, causing a growing segregation of activities, functions and social groups. While a part of Western culture has tried to counteract this process by withdrawing itself in the reassuring universe of past continuity , other scholars have accepted this condition turning it into a manifesto . This is the position that the young Dutch architect Willem Jan Neutelings assumes as a starting point, interpreting a portion of the Dutch territory, which stretches from The Hague to Rotterdam, as a patchwork in which different patches are juxtaposed to one another and each one is characterized by a specific functional program and physical structure.