Il progetto dell’identità. Descrivere la realtà contemporanea attraverso il progetto di architettura

“The word "inhabiting" means something more than having a roof overhead and a number of square meters available. First of all, it means meeting other human beings to exchange goods, ideas and feelings, that is to experience life as a multitude of possibilities. Second, it means to agree with some of them, that is to accept a number of common values. And finally, it means being yourself, that is to choose a small personal world.”(Norberg-Schulz 1984) The project of architecture for the city finds itself at a crossroad: being the sensible demonstration of a personal attitude towards the profession, or disappearing into the processes and hide itself, in the best scenario, behind temporary shapes. It is evident that architecture is called to not look only at the single object, but at wider and more complex contexts, in which the emerges the necessity for the creation of new balance and for the start of processes of identity and spatial appropriation. But still too few are the examples capable of authentically being themselves while at the same time being able to re-interpret the identity of the places re-configuring new scenarios in continuity with the natural atmospheric reality of places. Only in built spaces strongly tied to a context, it is possible for the life to go on authentically, creating a “significant relation between a human being and a given environment”, so that “the condition of living” occurs. (Norberg-Schulz 1984) Starting from the assumption that inhabiting does not mean to simply reside, but to live the spaces of the city, we faced a reflection through the reading of three cases (Quinta da Malagueira housing complex in Evora of Alvaro Siza, Reconfiguration of a Shanty Town in Seoul of Florian Beigel and Philip Christou, Elemental project directed by Alejandro Aravena) trying to comprehend how it could be possible today to inhabit private and public spaces, and what are the values that can be expressed in them and in which the people can recognise themselves, to inhabit them and to look after them. Said cases have been chosen as examples of contemporary architectures capable of rediscovering and amplifying the identity of specific places through the systematisation of physical and abstract elements.