“The hypercity is the result of a series of antagonizing choices that obey to rational and irrational logics.” Swiss teacher André Corboz expressed the concept of hypercity in 1994, in the book ‘Ordine sparso’. Years before, Italian architects Carlo Aymonino and Aldo Rossi were already theorizing the future development of big cities: fragmented plots without any apparent geography. The two architects designed together the Monte Amiata residential complex in Milan, Italy, that was built in the late 1960s.
The project aimed to satisfy more complicated ways of living, following a logic of programmatic disorder, and anticipating the concept of hypercity. Like an early portrait of our modern cities, it is a place where the past is still an echo and future is revealed. An urban layout of overlapping elements that constitute a complex texture that is so much more than the sum of its parts.
Alba Deangelis is an architectural photographer based in Milan. She was born and grew up in the mediterranean region of Puglia, but she moved to Milan in 2007 to study architecture. The great change of culture and environment shaped her mentally and visually, as she lost the view of the horizon and the bright colors.
While studying she discovered architectural photography and started to use the camera to put the visual and emotional chaos under mental and aesthetic control. Self-taught, she started working professionally in 2017, always focusing on architecture, but also working on commissions relating the art and design world. Through a process of detachment and sometimes abstraction, she focuses on few particular aspects of a space, isolating portions of it and merging them with her life experience and personal feelings about it.
text and pictures by Alba Deangelis