La recollection in tranquillity come operazione progettuale. Il lavoro per immagini mentali tipiche e archetipiche di Aires Mateus e Sparks Architects

The discourse on mental images is an ancient and farraginous issue that is rooted in the awe of our ancestors to relate, even in conditions of darkness, sleep or closed eyes, with internal, mental images, the origin of which they did not know. «We formulate them all the time, thinking, imagining, daydreaming or in sleep, and there is no doubt that these internal images while not tangible, have an undoubted consistency [...], the internal image is mobile and made not only of visual but also of acoustic, tactile, and emotional elements» (Falcinelli, 2021: 159-160). Starting from research carried out in the field of psychology and neuroscience, the hypothesis is based on the idea that some mental images are not only the result of a psycho-physiological condition related to the subject and his or her experience (which we could define as type-A mental image) but were formed in the course of the evolution of the nervous system to be then handed down from generation to generation. It would be referred to as archetypal images those ancestral images (type-C image), that have a biological nature and are common to all human beings, and as typical images (type-B image) those that derive from social constructs, which strongly linked to the culture of the community to which the subject belongs. It is believed that some designers make use of what the English poet William Wordworth called Recollection in tranquility to trace and resurface those mental images which were stratified throughout millennials in the nervous system. An operational design tool that would allow architects to begin an interior archaeological excavation work to reach images useful in conceiving their design concept. The modus operandi of two architectural firms that are geographically and conceptually distant from each other are examined: Aires Mateus Arquitectos and Sparks Architects. On the one hand, the European architecture of Portuguese brothers Manuel and Francisco Aires Mateus, which is grounded in the phenomenological tradition and which, for the realization of the Casa en Monsaraz (Portugal, 2018), looks to the archetypal – primordial embodied image – as a prime ideational principle; on the other, the work of the Australian firm Sparks Architects, which, through a “super-ecological” vision of architecture, draws on the type – mental image of socio-cultural nature – to realize, along the Sunshine Coast, in South East Queensland, an innovative and technological version of the Tent House (2016).