Armed Architectures/Weapons of Architecture

The need to 'connect' appears, today, stronger the more pervasively the tendency to 'separate' and build barriers manifests itself. And it is exactly those physical and/or virtual barriers, in a broad sense, which are the places where the conflict between peoples and cultures are manifested, the background of a narrative horizon that will be tentatively explored, renouncing first of all the consideration of architecture as a neutral protagonist of this story, but declaring, instead, right from the start, the impossibility of its ‘innocence'. The following reflections develop, therefore, testing the tools of representation and design of architecture, as areas of possible critical interpretation of the living space. A space in continuous evolution, understood as a space of relations and connections, of interferences and conflicts, which opens a critical horizon in which representation cannot be limited to an exclusively descriptive role of the real, but it can and must instead assume that of a powerful narrator of its complexity and therefore as an activator of imagination and critical thinking, working in perfect harmony with the logic of the 'project' of which it is revealed to be an integral part. The metaphor around which the reflections will develop is that of the wall, intended as a protection, but also as a barrier, a border, a barricade, a line of demarcation, a limit, as an impenetrable element and yet as an element whose evocative force is all enclosed in its permeability and, therefore, in the possibility of crossing it. A possible interpretation will be given of the 'walls' that scatter the contemporary scene and the reasons why we erect them, certainly a partial and not exhaustive one, but however useful to catch a glimpse of the ways in which the architectural narrative often intervenes in the dynamics put in place, to build or break them down, with the power of its creative gesture. And not without responsibility!