32/ CENTVRIA DUILOVO Split, Radman Vrbanek © MMIX Competition

Duilovo Urban Plan, Split

SPLIT
Legend has it that Roman Emperor Diocletian enjoyed growing cabbages so much so that he declined to reengage in politics, despite the pressing need, and retired to the place that would become Split. At the turn of the fourth century AD, he built a palace four miles from Salona, the capital of the Roman province of Dalmatia. The palace for one became a town for 5000 (in the Middle Ages), and eventually sprawled to become the second largest city in Croatia.
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Romans, the champions of pragmatics, introduced the practice of centuriation where the territory of the ager (countryside) was gridded for the purpose of efficient colonisation. The ground was thus instantly transformed into land, with legal implications (ownership, maintenance). De facto was effectively augmented by de jure. The morphology of centuriation survives to this day and could be considered an invariant of the city. It persists in the face of change.

CENTVRIA
The new tourist development with a harbour is to preserve the continuity of the waterfront and yet to provide for an ‘autonomy’ of the resort.
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Incidentally the site fits into a single centuria (which is but a pure coincidence). We saw this as a chance to delineate the area unequivocally, while at the same time maintaining the implicit (or maybe not so implicit) connection with the city at the level of the system. The fact that the grid is indifferent to topography was but welcome, as it produced a local tension in subdivision (which would otherwise have to be created out of the blue).
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The Centuria Duilovo is divided between territory and aquatory (half-half). In this way, the reclaimed waterfront becomes a version of the decumanus (east-west). The streets in the opposite direction (north-south) morph into peers of the harbour.