Guest Curator: Dr Anna Riciputo

In everyday language, cutting something to the bones means reducing it to the essential, that is, the elements indispensable to guarantee the very existence of things and ideas. Within the ontological and phenomenological reflection on the primitive nature of architecture, Le Corbusier proposes the Maison DomIno as a zero-degree architecture capable of becoming the “rule of new architectural orders”. The skeleton, whose function is to give shape and support, is what remains when everything around it is worn out: as guardian of memory, it suggests what it was, and in the continuous wear and tear of the ruins, it shows the continuity of time through absence.

Is the fate of architecture the infinite potential or the inevitable ruin?

In this volume of Urban Corporis "to the Bones", we ask to define and interpret the concept of skeleton of the architecture, of the city and the landscape. It is a complex system of supporting elements to re-investigate and re-design the city and the territory. The aim is to read anew the essential elements of an anatomically exact complex architectural system:

• the skull that contains the founding characters
• the backbone that supports the position
• the long limbs that stretch outwards and upwards
• the scattered bones that suggest possibilities and re-compositions

Authors are asked to reflect on (but not limited to) the following suggestions:  

1. Bones such as historical or industrial archaeology, isolated remains or deep stratified networks that have woven spines on which the urban fabric has developed or will be able to create.

2. Bones, like the remains of colonialism, the artefacts written on foreign land, and the destinies of men and nations, can direct the dynamics of the contemporary city or have remained as history witnesses in the landscape, becoming Landmarks.

3. Bones like large outcropping stones, mountain ranges, promontories and slopes that have adapted man to nature. Bones of the Earth that support the architecture and infrastructures, in turn, have had to modify shapes by drawing new intricate pathways.

4. Bones like the fortifications, the great walls and the giant aqueducts on which parasitic architectures are grafted, which surround the urban agglomerations whose original geometries are still legible in the lattice of the contemporary city or which, sinking and emerging from the ground, project towards the countryside, large sleeping giants to be used as tools for the re-appropriation of time in integrated projects;

5. Bones as fragments recovered and used within contemporary artefacts to generate the transtemporal architecture promoter of the aesthetics of fracture.