Embodying Periphery

Abstract

The correspondence between the structure of the human body and the shape of the city has been a constant that has crossed the history of architecture since the foundation of the first settlements. This link of correspondence is attributable, in classical culture and up to its revival in the Renaissance, to a thought of cosmogonic unity according to which the same regulating principle hierarchically orders the structure of the celestial world, that of the earthly world up to man. The loss of this unity, with the entry into the modern age, coincided with the discovery of the LANDSCAPE, which was given as an antipole to the city. Going back to speaking in the contemporaneity of the body (the totality of the city and of the landscape) takes on a different meaning – far from being understood as a will to react – which replies to the apparent totalizing dematerialization of the DIGITAL, with the search for a completely internal transformation potential as happens in the BIOLOGICAL field. Only the body can be considered in its uniqueness, in its unrepeatability, in its truth.