Countryside Theories

A text of Manfredo Tafuri compiled in a single copy, inspires my thesis’s work, in a continuous rebound between research and project. The anti-urban ideology is the means by which attention is currently growing towards the countryside and the land as a means of production: What will be the role of Architecture?

In a period when the ground is asked to return to production, the new challenge for Architecture is to make itself at the service of the ground. After a research phase that has covered the history of anti-urban ideologies, the thesis is focused on translating the theory into a project: a project that wants to define the characteristics of this new architecture. The first question is about the ground’s necessities. We need a slowed-down time that adapts itself to natural rhythms: the new measurement’s unites are not seconds, minutes, hours, but lunar cycles, seasons, years. The same is true of space: we no longer deal with the small measurement of the centimeter or the square meter, but rather with the hectare, a size that is not part of our mode of designing. Therefore, it is necessary to implement a re-foundation process that starts from words and extends to architecture. Architecture enhances this rebirth by placing itself as a cathedral of the ground, a monument that sinks its roots and marks the surrounding space. This is how new rural outposts, new aircraft carriers of production are born. And just like aircraft carriers, these architectures work like machines. A heavy structure is destined to follow the slow time of the ground and to last over time; a light technology adapts and renews itself based on progress. In this way, the very ancient and the super contemporary blend together to create an architecture that shows the power of returning to live with the ground, inside the ground, cultivating the ground. Now if the ground stops being productive, architecture also dies.