1. CORE OF THE PROBLEM The exaltation of the architectural object-project’s role and its fixity is a synthesis of a process that absolutises conceptual methods and shapes. The development of Weakcity assumes a bi-polar cultural system that on one hand glorifies the magnificence, the extraordinariness and the subjectivity of self-referential, a-topic shape: shapes that consider the marvellous as the ‘supreme instance legitimising all’. 2 On the other side, contemporary research resists experimentation with new project-based methods that go beyond the vertical, remaining firmly inside the ‘science of space’. Attitudes which belong to present-day culture underline three principal causes that become the base assumptions of Weakcity: 1 The exactitude synthesised by both the architectonic object and urban design – an exactitude that is ineffective for new urban problems. We break the relationship between project and object (i.e. project = methodological precision 3 , project = drawing, project = type). Instead we underline instability as a new process, proposing non-designative space characterised by relative and rhetorical qualities of decoration, of ephemeralisation and of secondariness, both methodologically and formally. 2 The hypertelos of architecture. In fact, architecture is a hypertelos of images, a simulacrum of reality that produces simulative shapes more than interpretive or imaginative ones. We wish to erase from the real this ‘invisible other’. Possible and different levels of reality compromise not only the transformative attitude of space, but new meanings, new ‘substance’. 4 By eternalising and problematising only the present, architecture erases the possible, virtuality, allusion, and the relationship with an invisible in the construction of the city. 3 Atony: the expression of a monotone line that does not observe differences, suspense, alternations of spaces. Atony refers to two specific conditions: the linguistic homogeneity of contemporary architecture, revealed by a lexical and methodological globalised evenness, and the loss of place- specific conditions. Atony is closely related to the concept of atopy. These three conditions represent three different levels of ‘reduction’ in different and consequential ways; they specify the hyper-valuation of design as a project-based principle: methodology is locked into established codexes; the architectural object is at present unable to renounce itself; and there is an incapacity for thought to be dynamic and differential moments of a process for which ‘the essence of architecture is its disappearance’.
2. NON-FIGURATIVE AND NON-DESIGNATIVE TERRITORIES: SCIENTIFIC ETYMOLOGY
Methodological branches related to non-figurative and non-designative spaces comprise an ‘inverse codex’ inside urban theory, linked to the critics of modernism and its logic- synthetic codes.
The scientific parentheses of the research are: Situationism, from which we take the values of temporary/impermanence/modification
Radicality, in particular Archizoom’s and Superstudio’s research from in which we find the dissolution of the architectural object and the values of performative and genetic surfaces. The research of Andrea Branzi, in particular, is crucial here. Land art, from which we assimilate the techniques of ephemeralisation, the glossary and the concept of entropy. Landscape Urbanism of Charles Waldheim, James Corner, Moshen Mostafavi and Stan Allen, from which we take the conceptual substitution of landscape for architecture and planning. Weak architecture of De Solà-Morales, for the methodological cuts, the decorations, the dissolution of architecture in its absolutist role. Weakcity’s relation with Landscape Urbanism amplifies the short-circuit inside previous hermeneutical steps in the theory- project relationship. We can read this relation as connected to the sequence space-place-context-landscape , where Landscape Urbanism is a new experiment composed of: 1 Theory, developed through a critique of Modernism and synthetic-exact approaches; through trans-disciplinarity as a scientific development of continuous regeneration (a substitute for the ‘science of space’) and through the formulation of an adaptive urbanism. 2 Methodology, that substitutes and hybridises an ecological logic for the traditional urban logic of plan, program and urban design. It privileges dialogue over the dialectic suggested by theory of complexity (as culture/ nature, nature/city, figure/background), and it reduces the centrality of architectonic scale and architecture in general as a topic for urban design. 3 Operational strategy, that privileges horizontal surfaces over vertical ones, reactivating the field as the favoured space of transformations and relations inside the role of performative surface. In this way, we lose vernacular/ romantic ideas related to landscape.
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2 Tomás Maldonado. Reale e virtuale . Milan: Giangiacomo Feltrinelli Editore, 1994 3 David Harvey in The Condition of Postmodernity , 1990, highlights theoretical and consequential reduction in reference paradigms in the transition from modernity to post-modernity. 4 J. Baudrillard, Le strategie fatali, ed. Feltrinelli, Milano, 2007
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