In Small and Interconnected, three authors from diverse scientific and design backgrounds contribute to the ongoing debate on effective strategies for making open spaces more strategic in addressing our cities’ challenges - outlining a new open space model to mend fragmentation, preserve natural resources, reduce the heat island effect, and maximize existing environmental quality. Through intense collaborative exchange, they gauge fundamental references and principles to draw the contemporary need for designed open spaces, through an incremental methodological approach. By means of a series of design experiences, addressing inflections, divergences, and continuity, highlighting them in the design process and making them legible, they project the emergence of a new model capable of providing functional flexibility, diversified responses for the community, allowing for the unfolding and experience of “life between buildings”.

Caterina Frettoloso
architect, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Environmental Design and Technology of Architecture at the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”. Her research activities are related to the qualification of settlement and environmental systems, focusing on technologies aimed at reusing urban open spaces and redeveloping sensitive contexts (archaeological areas and degraded landscapes). She is researching the “connectivity” concept applied to urban open space networks and the “circular” approach to the built environment to individuate transformative strategies for more resilient cities.

Holger Kehne
PhD, is an architect working across practice and academia, continents and multiple scales and domains. He is co-founder of the award-winning architectural practice Plasma Studio- Brunico, Beijing, Hong Kong, and Singapore and currently teaches in the MArch program at the University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong programme of the University of Plymouth. Framing the confluence of practice and academic research, he explores architecture’s systemic relationships, linking buildings with landscape, urban fields, and local context through their syntactic, tectonic registers.

Francesca Muzzillo
architect, is a Full Professor of Environmental Design and Technology of Architecture at the University of Campania “Luigi Vanvitelli”. Her interests are in the congruence among the following points: Environmental Design, innovative environmental performances and landscape aesthetic values, from English Landscape Garden to Land Art, not only as landscape design elements but also as sustainable components of innovative architecture. She has been researching and pursuing the relation among these elements during her academic life at all different scales, from the architectonical details to the landscape dimension.