“TURKU ON FIRE”. IL “GRID PLAN” ALLE RADICI DELLA CITTÀ CONTEMPORANEA.

The 2011 is an important year for Turku, the political capital of Finland until 1811. This is the year in which the city has been nominated European Capital of Culture thanks to the project 'Turku on Fire’ - a play on words with a distant root, but at the base of the Country’s contemporary urban structure. The theme of fire is so deeply rooted in the history and in the culture of this urban centre to be mentioned in the slogan of this great event; the meaning is simple: from the fire that hit the city in 1827 and scored his nineteenth-century decline, to the rebirth from the ashes and the assert as European cultural circle. The fire cleared almost every sign of the medieval Turku. This event, while representing a tragic chapter in the history of the town, it reveals an opportunity to completely reshape the entire city core. The grid plan, a model which consists of identical blocks placed in a regular grid, as defined by historians of architecture and urbanism, is the result and Carl Ludwig Engel (1778-1840), a young architect of German origin, is the author. About the new project what really fascinates are the "exceptions" to the search for regularity, and three are the most important sites, the so called tradeoff places: the square (design of the architect), the train station (a further project) and the harbour (important preexistence), today confirmed as city centres and seats of, not only physical but also cultural, "exchanges".