A new baroque for the environmental quality of the city

In his book about eighteenth-century Rome, Hans Gross [1] writes about the project for St. Peter’s Square and Borromini’s colonnade, saying that while the plans for Rome were intended to increase the splendour of the city and its sovereign, they were not aimed only at the glory of faith but also at the comfort and satisfaction of tourists. The author highlights a point of view that seemed very current; here it is represented as a research hypothesis that investigates what are the reasons that determine satisfaction (i.e. comfort) in people who frequent certain urban places. The question is: how do some precise, significant examples of Baroque architecture demonstrate, with data in hand, the ability of a monumental building to offer all those quality and well-being advantages for which it was designed? This article develops the idea that the shape and layout of the façade is not only an aspect of formal beauty but also a prelude to a new vision of adaptation to climate change. Some examples of Baroque architecture are investigated with regard to the indoor-outdoor mass/space ratio using a parametric methodology called TENS (Tomographic ENvironmental Section), which is applied in urban and bioclimate studies. The same methodology allows to identify small places diffused in ancient and contemporary urban fabrics as a system potentially able to modify, through targeted interventions, the urban microclimate and to contrast the effects of climate change. In conclusion, what emerges is the modern nature of a project designed to provide urban places dedicated to people (formerly pilgrims) and their full sensory well-being. Keywords: Baroque façades, Urban comfort, Climate and architecture, Computational urban analysis