Uchronia: Space of Becoming
This is not the only world possible, even less the best one. As much as we struggle to contain the damage, as long as we refuse to set up the search of the Alternative, we will fall back to the mistakes we made. Mistakes that now define our cities, our suburbs, the space of our daily life. This is the true main issue Architecture faces today, not how much greenwashing is necessary to get a platinum LEED certificate. We need to set ourselves out to explore radically different ideas of urban space, not which specific technologic solution to use. We are so immersed into the present system that we cannot think ourselves out of it, busy as we are plugging the holes of an already sinking ship . In the past, three architects went looking for alternatives to re-shape the reality they were living into and feeling its shortcomings. Gian Battista Piranesi looks at its city, XVII century’s Rome, and perceives an incredible uncovered potential hidden behind its surface. He does not care about the recent new science of Archaeology and its innate drive to block the status of things in a specific date. Piranesi is interested in building a giant machina, a city-sized design capable of expanding the range of possibilities available to its inhabitants and thus improving their lives . The same goes for Antonio Sant’Elia in early 1900’s Italy. His city, Milan, is quickly changing via steel-frame and reinforced concrete technologies. The issue is that it is not changing enough. New buildings still sport the same old, pointless Beaux-Arts details and moldings, just with a concrete-and-iron core. Sant’Elia does not settle for this, he is capable and willing of re-thinking the City, any city, completely, bending the potential of these new construction techniques. The result is an organism of incredible complexity, of un-separable parts yet not set in stone, to adapt to the necessities of its inhabitants. The palimpsest of the different Images that shape the City, is the background of Aldo Rossi’s theory. At its core there is the idea of ‘architecture made by other architecture’, exemplified in the exceptionally clear image of the Tavola della Città Analoga. The embodiment of Rossi’s forma mentis that sees the City as the superimposition of carefully selected Images of experiential origin, structured around the narration of a space. The architectural equivalent of Aby Warburg’s Atlas Mnemosyne , the freedom of image association, the anti-philological approach to architectural design, are all tool necessary to re-shape our contingency, less we fall into the vicious circle that brought us here. These three figures, while not the only ones, bring forth the idea that we are not to ask ourselves «How things will be?», which imply the acceptance of the Present and moves the goalpost to the ontologically un-colonizable terrain of the Future (as Deleuze and Guattari explained ). We are to pose the Other question, «How things could be instead?» to allow to fully express the potential hidden in our present.
