Elsewhere

Francesca Calvelli

To design means making decisions and choices, constantly, on many scales and in several fields. It also requires to be aware of many things, among which the first one is that when we design something that project will stand in a future, in a world, it will be part of a system and will respond to its rules. Beside this fundamental awareness there is therefore the first and main decision: to choose whether or not to let a project exist in the future described by the conditions set by the client and the assumptions underlying it, thus choosing whether or not to perpetuate the cultural/economic/productive/etc reference model.

In this sense, working in the city is ever more difficult and problematic: philosophy - in the broadest sense - and the global economic system are increasingly introjected into each other, and making architecture inevitably means producing devices supporting this system. Moreover, if we consider the genericness of architectural artefacts there’s clearly no longer need for the architect’s maternity, for whom therefore the ejection from the city - voluntary or forced - is more and more close.

This reflection intends to look at the landscape as the place where it is possible to find space and to work without having to deal with some superstructures and the compromises they entail.

Supported by a selection of projects apparently isolated, disengaged and detached from any broader reality than the territory in which they stand, the research investigates the alternative dimension that this approach to architecture mediated by landscape defines, and suggests a systemic reading of all those episodes that - precisely by virtue of their very isolation - respond to a contingent reality and automatically describe an alternative one, in which - there and nowhere else - a set of relationships can exist.