Compositional thought and language. Projects at the margins

«Language of substantial immobility» is how Juan Borchers defines the architecture that makes the place the first manifestation of the work as a built act. From compositional thought, architecture discloses itself into reality through material construction, translating the idea into form. In this process, the site plays a decisive role as it defines the character of the building. Architecture emerges from the encounter between two tensions, the form of the imagination and the context with its characteristics, peculiarities, limits. Knowing them provides the ability to reveal, through the project, a wider reality that escapes the language of contingency. If to build means «to elaborate with earth, to put a human mark upon a landscape, modifying it forever thereby», the architect must be able to recognize the ground as a compositional resource which is rewritten by control and manipulation. Architecture is defined as a necessary act that not only gives a shape to the site but transforms it by translating forms of nature into pieces of geometry. The space built by architecture is not designed starting from aspects of pure image but from the clarification of the characters of the place; the relationship between figure and construction is therefore the result of “actions” – not “creations” – capable of arousing tensions rather than leading back to a pre-established order or rule applicable everywhere. Talking about language means recovering the sense of place for the project, overcoming abstract experiments, using those words of composition able to translate the specific conditions of the place into geometric form: the attack on the ground, the use of light, the structural and material choices. The place brings with it the problem of inhabit or rather – on this occasion – that of re-inhabiting contexts that for various reasons have suffered from abandonment and depopulation. Lands at the margins such as those of the Alps where natural elements establish the limits of human action and the fragmentation of spaces requires a reading of architecture not aimed at the single object, with consequent homologation of the places that would condemn them to silence, but around the characteristics of permanence, continuity, tradition. Building the conditions of re-habitability of villages in the process of depopulation and, more generally, of fragile and complex environments, means recognizing the matrix of places, their systemic relationships, being the result of specific transformative phenomena, which cannot be solved with the stereotyping of forms according to pre-existing figurative canons.