Phd in ARCHITECTURE. THEORIES AND PROJECT

Thesis title: KL. Forme, figure e significati dell'architettura nei campi di concentramento

This research examines the spatial dimension of concentration camps, specifically those built and used by the Nazi regime in Germany and across Europe between 1933 and 1945 for the detention and murder of millions of people. Is there, therefore, a limit beyond which ‘architecture’ alone is no longer sufficient to describe what man builds? And if the camps are not architecture, then what are they? Simply ‘something else’? Is it really possible to think of Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald or even Auschwitz as part of the same field of knowledge that produced Hadrian’s Villa, the Convent of Santa Maria de La Tourette or the House on the Waterfall? What we might infer is perhaps more simply a generic “utilitarian principle”, such that these places exist in the form in which they were built because they respond solely to the requirements derived from their most base purpose? Is it possible to trace some of those superstructures (linguistic, formal, aggregative, aesthetic, etc.) that are characteristic of the practice of architecture?