Preamble

Please, if you read this, keep in mind that it is a collection of thoughts that are RIGHT NOW being turned into a short and clear manifesto :0)

....................................................................................................................................................................

1)Liberty vs Detention

The intellectual tradition of the West has, with great consistency, always championed the cause of unity and equality as primal routes towards personal or communal liberty.

Since the notion of detention has been defined by the rite of exclusion that seals off distasteful parts by severing connections or preventing communications with the otherwise unite whole; the idea of liberty, and its practice, has been shaped on its obverse: on the notion that a total free and infinite flow of information and connections leads towards that optimistic mode of social interaction that has come to represent the idea of liberty itself.

2) Liberty and the notion of unlimited mobility

The nature of this conception was promptly translated into the structure of our surroundings by the modernist paradigm of urbanization through the idea of unlimited mobility. Of that hyper connected condition of limitlessness made possible by an ever expanding, potentially endless and omni-comprehensive network of infrastructure.

Referred to with many and often overlapping labels like urban sprawl, network-city or carpet metropolis, this mode of urbanization takes the character of an isotropic grid that articulates equal distributions and avoids conflict by balancing differences. Primarily propelled by economic reasons, the city becomes a mere problem of economic organization _{(paradigma gestionale Giorgio Agamben)} with no representative or iconic function. A device that creates the best condition for the reproduction of the labour force: “a plane inhabited in the most efficient way by people and processes”.

This totalizing vision of the city is intended to absorb differences and homogenize the urban territory by depriving the city of its political power.

In the attempt to tame the wild chaos of the disorderly metropolis, the modern architect -the omniscient, benevolent hero- has deliberately neglected many voices defined by multiple identities, aspirations and life-worlds.

The city is tranquil, quiet, sedated of an eerie calm.

3) For the collapse of totalizing urbanization

The time has come for architects to dismiss with no qualms this worthless heirloom.

Since we seem well launched into an era of despondency and retrenchment, it is probably easier now to understand that the immersion in a milieu of indiscriminate emblems, images, messages and ideas -as the idea of the city as a continuity of movement without any frame or limit- might just as easily discompose and confuse individuals and communities, as enlighten them.

The once so vaunted “culture of congestion”, explicated to us through the delirium of New York, has been superseded by what we might term the “culture of evacuation”. The city, the public space, is being abandoned. The politics of space (territory and defense) is being replaced by the politics of time (transport, communication, speed and network). Space no longer really matters for a population that is increasingly subject to delocalization. When everyone is a tourist and the in-transit condition has become the generalized form of life (testified on a geopolitical scale by the ever growing refugee problem) cities can’t be represented as a homogeneous carpets where every district is the same and every part is an embodiment of the whole.

The very idea of an infinite and totalizing urbanization has to collapse in favor of a partisan reading of the city.

The instability of the settlement has to be counterbalanced by defined strongholds of predominance, serene abodes of peaceful retreat.  

4) The desire for sanctuary is with us once more

It would be wrong to maintain that the function of architectural enclosure is solely to keep out inclement weather.

Inclemency is not exclusively meteorological and architecture has to fulfill the role of an environmental censor also by expelling the terrors of over-communion.

Like sensory aphasia –an audible censorship that prevents the understanding of certain classes of words- is now being understood as a limping attempt to retain personal equilibrium in hostile surroundings,

retreat - the operation of severing connections with undesired realities- is here understood as an efficient operation that echoes, reflects, conserves and reinforces a well determined way of life: an attempt to preserve the world in absolute consonance with a set idea of it.

In this scenario retreat becomes a new architectural paradigm aimed at preserving –if not intensify by association- the holistic and unitary concept of our enclave of meaningful order.  

Like an armory, architecture should aim at defending the integrity of its content against undesired inroads, preventing entropy of meaning and energy-transfers.

Like a mantle that envelops its inhabitants in a familiar landscape, architecture should aim towards the creation of precincts, within whose boundaries we correspond with and therefore vindicate our ideological prejudices.

Like serene monuments, these sequestered precincts -palisade of reflection, grace and solitude- become the iconic incarnation of a decision (from the Latin caedere: to cut, to cut the link from).

What you miss out + technique in human failure

5) The Archipelago

The archipelago is here understood as the form of the city that incarnates the composition of contrasting parts _{(coincidentia oppositorum, coincidence of opposing parts)}.

Each island is the iconic incarnation of a decision (from the Latin caedere: to cut). Each island cuts the links with its own counterpart and since what counters it inevitably constitutes the knowledge of its limits; the act of retreat becomes the iconic affirmation of its own figure or position.

As such these parts are not just scattered fragments but are antithetically established, meaning that they are bound as a whole precisely by the way they react dialectically to each other.

The formal operation of defining and representing those physical or psychological thresholds incarnates the struggle for autonomy and must be architecture’s ultimate ambition. i.e. to manifest and frame (limit) the possibilities of diversity by making diversity dialectical rather than hypertrophic.

The city no longer relies on planning, but is formed as a composition of architectural artifacts, each conceived as a formally defined micro-city. Singular architectural interventions punctuate the urban fabric creating a city that is no longer a continuous and ever expanding network made by density and infrastructure, but rather a composition of formed and thus limited city-islands. Each Islands are thought as architecturally defined complexes, centralities within the existing urban fabric that are preserved and ultimately densified and determine the gradual abandonment of the rest of the city. That is transformed into a huge green forest. Rather then projecting urbanization, architecture is used to frame it and limit it, to counter its infinity with form.

Implicitly attacking the fundamental basics of urbanism, integration and expansion, the archipelago has also to be considered in light of the future urgency to limit the explosive and largely unsustainable growth of many contemporary cities.