Edited by: Riccardo Del Fabbro riccardodelfabbro@gmail.com
Where: ?
Photo by: Giulia Bonisoli
SILENTARCHITECTURE
For this position I’d like to consider for a moment the Georges Perec’s concept of infra-ordinary.
Perrec, in the book “The infra-ordinary”, it asks:
« What’s really going on, what we’re experiencing, the rest, all the rest, where is it? How should we take account of, question, describe what happens every day and recurs everyday: the banal, the quotidian, the obvious, the common, the ordinary, the infra-ordinary, the background noise, the habitual? » *
To this building, or rather to this neighborhood, I will not give coordinates nor real name, I’ll just call it give “Tetris”.
It is a series of social housing built between the 70’s and the 80’s.
Such as many of these interventions in those years, this architectures were designed to solve the absence of homes, not to create new livable and “human-scale” parts of the city.
A real neighborhood built from scratch.
In fact this area, until the mid-sixties was just open country, and even today the agricultural fields are not too far apart.
All of these buildings, which are located on one of the main roads leading to the city center, are surrounded by large green areas, which apparently makes the scale less monstrous.
Unfortunately, these green areas are both a quality and a problem for these buildings.
These parks provide the opportunity for local residents to be able to get out of their apartments for outdoor activities, but unfortunately these large green spots isolate even more the buildings and their inhabitants from the city life.
Being able to see the area from above, one has the impression of a real joint of pentominoes, just like in Tetris, a joint which unfortunately has many gaps, just like an unlucky level of tetris.
In mathematics, it was verified that a Tetris game ends with SURELY defeat.
Unfortunately for this neighborhood, if somedoby will not rethink the connection with the center of the city, and especially the connection between the manifold and the open spaces that form this neighborhood, there’s a the possibility of a defeat.
An urban and social defeat.
But.
What about an architectural or aesthetical point of view?
Being able to lead a journey of alienation in this place and from this place, being able to deny us from a possible research towards new, to what is unique, this position number 5 in the top 5 “a terrible beauty is born” can certainly change value.
« Go on until this place becomes uncertain, until you feel, for a little while, the feeling of being in a foreign city, or even better, in a place in which you don’t understand much of what will happen or not happen. » *
* PEREC GEORGES, The infra ordinary, Bollati Boringhieri, 1994
