Trasformazione per sottrazione: la spoliazione dell'architettura

The subtraction of architecture is the most extreme phase in the transformation of a building, intent on reusing the physical space it once occupied or the remains of its structures. This process produces a physical reduction in what is built, with implications tied to the violation of its material integrity, similar to an assault on its original completeness. Whether the result of traumatic events or planned actions, tampering with the physical compactness of a building always produces unexpected effects. Any alteration in the stability and immutability associated – in Western culture – with architectural construction, produces a sense of violence, comparable to the profanation of the most intimate and reassuring things man creates to survive. The destruction of the Tower of Babel is an allegorical transposition of the human aspiration for truth, an aspiration negated by divine punishment. Aspects of a religious and ideological-political character have produced events that left their mark on the progress of human history: from destruction caused by war to more recent incidents such as the demolition of the Berlin Wall or the collapse of the Twin Towers in New York, or the removal of symbols of now defunct ideologies or dethroned rulers. These are the themes proposed in the text, intent on offering a contribution whose final result is to be found in the use of subtraction as a practice for recovering the conditions necessary to create a new organisation of the spaces inhabited by man.