Architetture tra sovrana ragione e diritti dell’altro

Abstract

The theme of total institutions can be reconsidered in terms of the relationship between architectural forms and the recognition or the denial of the rights of people who inhabit them. In particular, asylums – places where the power of reason has been exercised in order to create an architectural structure for people considered to be in some way outside or beyond reason – ask questions about architecture’s relationships with both power and reason, including its own power as an agent of discipline and the reason it projects onto its subjects. Intervening architecturally on these controversial pre-existences, means rethinking places whose history of use as asylums has ended – closed in the name of newly hard-won rights and of shifts in political thinking.  Instead, these must become places which architecture opens up to the community as a guarantee of those acquired rights, as an example of a practice of a politics of space, of the past history of space and its possible future.