Earthen Construction. Graphic Mediation in Spontaneous Architecture

This paper proposes a reflection on spontaneous architecture, a theme dealtwith in detail by BernardRudofsky, who in the exhibition "Architecture without architects” is critical of the author’s architecture that places more emphasis on the creator at the expense of collective logics that have formed the basis of architectural thought. Considering that the evolution of building has not been shaped by architects, but by certain social, political and economic contexts, means reading the history of architecture not on the basis of a scientific production carried out in individual graphic elaborations, but by communitarian reflections and awareness. In this sense, architecture is free from aprioristic thought, and not constrained by a tension that starts from the final form, but generated by the constructive process that progressively occupies the space defining a place. Two fundamental questions are connected to the mediation of design in the project conception (and its possible lack): the first concerns the authorship of the work that is the need -found by Vasari for the first time- to identify an architect and his cultural context in order to attribute meaning and value to a building. The second theme, on the other hand, is closely linked to the constructive reasons and processes that generate a type of participatory architecture, sometimes without overall planning and graphic design representation. This is the case of earthen architecture, its evolutions and the approach to this technique in the contemporary culture.