Contaminated Architecture

This paper investigates the processes of contamination intended as creative tampering design operations of the pre-existing. The entry of new architectural voids and bodies in pre-existing urban structures and buildings can reconfigure the sign and the meaning of the already given, rediscovering the matrices of a spatial grammar that relates to reality “through figures” that are viral. Contamination “is the place of what is sick, confused, monstrous, wrong, unthinkable, especially impure” and partial. The time and the life, the reopening of a built work and the unfinished or the unexpected are possibilities of another fulfilment. Assuming contamination as a process, it “makes a writing not close within the limits of the ability to repeat its structure and its own formative mode”. Attacked by the virus, architecture takes responsibility for recognizing and interpreting heterogeneity, of tying harmonies, of revealing dissonances. It is a “re-generative process”, a practice of the project that becomes aware of reality and, inventing it by figures, tries to return it habitable and projected to the future.