Network Buildings: Definition and Assessment

The International Congress of Modern Architecture (CIAM), through the Athens Charter of 1933, strongly advocated the creation of open urban spaces as an essential principle of urban planning, referring to open spaces such as the city’s lungs. It is certainly for this reason that several authors choose the green spaces and urban parks of cities as the fundamental open public spaces to integrate in the design of new cities and in the rehabilitation of the oldest or parts of these. However, in the older cities, namely in their older core cities, or in compact cities the physical limitations, to a certain extent, make the existence and creation of this type of urban public space unfeasible. Above all, in these cases, the increase in the attractiveness of the public space should focus on the morphology of buildings, particularly on the ground floor, as it is also defended by several authors. In this context, this paper is dedicated to the definition of a new concept of building - network building (of generalized application to isolated buildings or set of buildings), whose conceptual characteristics have taken into account criteria of polyvalence, flexibility, adaptability, durability, sustainability, permeability and aggregation of functions. The role played by these buildings establishes connections and promotes pedestrian mobility, the interconnection of places of conviviality or daily use of the public space. These buildings also contribute to the diversity of activities of work, leisure, culture and housing, generating vitality of the environment and qualification of the urban areas where they are inserted. In addition to the definition of the new concept, an empirical assessment based on the adaptation of the correspondence analysis to the discriminant analysis is made to classify, in relative terms, 37 buildings of the city of Lisbon of the last 70 years.