Phd in ARCHITECTURE. THEORIES AND PROJECT

Thesis title: Performing Spaces. Dalla progressiva deumanizzazione dell’architettura alla riattivazione dello spazio anestetico contemporaneo

The thesis examines the effects of the digital revolution on the lived space of architecture and on the transformations underlying the ways in which it is conceived and produced. Daily exposure to a predominantly immaterial virtual environment entails a gradual disengagement from the experience of physical space, with the limitations and consequences this generates within the field of design. A closed vicious circle can be identified: the more the design of space constrains and discourages its use, the more the perception of space and the ability to inhabit it are undermined; consequently, design must increasingly conform to new prescriptions that avoid exposing individuals to experiences with which they are no longer familiar, and so on. Two main arguments emerge from this loop: on the one hand, the conception of the body within contemporary design—and, more broadly, within contemporary culture—comes to the fore; on the other, the crisis of the material dimension appears to coincide with the rise of an immaterial digital culture. The thesis investigates whether a relationship exists between the intangibility of the virtual and the crisis of physical space. This crisis is also shaped by the role assumed by the body, both in the way it interacts with its environment and in how it perceives danger or situations that inhibit action. The analysis of spatial experience makes it possible to identify several contemporary critical issues within the architectural discipline, which is compelled to confront the emergence of a virtual dimension that proposes forms of inhabitation independent of the configuration, usability, and material nature of physical space. It thus becomes necessary to assess how architectural efforts to define the materiality of space risk becoming obsolete, both at the perceptual and experiential levels. Performing Spaces. From the Progressive Dehumanization of Architecture to the Reactivation of Contemporary Anesthetic Space encapsulates, in its title, the aims of the work: the observation and analysis of the problematic context in which architecture operates today has led to the formulation of hypotheses intended to rebalance a scenario in which architectural space increasingly ceases to function as a domain of expression, no longer serving as the stage that hosts and generates the events constituting everyday life or singular, extraordinary experiences. The subtitle of the thesis also outlines its structure: the first two chapters focus on the transformations produced by the digital spatial turn, highlighting how interactivity replaces interaction, thereby undermining the traditional foundations of the physical experience of space; the third and fourth chapters further examine the condition of anesthetized space that emerges from this analysis, addressing its critical issues and ultimately proposing a design approach aimed at rehabilitating the experience of place through the integration of physical expressivity and digital potential. It is in the fourth chapter that the title Performing Spaces becomes fully intelligible: the gerund form deliberately blurs the subject of the action, suggesting that both space and the subject within it act simultaneously, mutually influencing one another in shaping the conditions that enable expression and the experience of place.