- Andrea Malagnino
- HIM and HER
Schoorl Duinen, The Netherlands 52°42’44.11”N 4°39’03.12”E
The project I propose is not the child of its time, it rejects the lexicon of current affairs (climate change, pollution, exploitation of resources) as well as that of social issues. It does not want to solve the problem of the site in which it operates, but it embraces a horizon of analysis and observation of man in his existential dimension, completely isolated from the dynamics determined by the homo faber. The project focuses on the relationship between the homo figurans 1 and the territory in which he lives, an archaic, but never anachronistic, relationship.
“We have to recognize the priority of representing on acting, or in other words, the homo figurans on the homo faber […] the landscape stands as an interface between doing and seeing what is done, between looking – representing and acting, between acting and looking. “2
Only when the homo figurans will able to understand and to represent the object of the territory, the homo faber can build his architectural object with a greater awareness. The architectural object has spatial and tactile quality similar to those offered by its landscape. It will be able to welcome the ambiguity of the site and not ignore it, an ambiguity granted by the relationships between topography, light, climate, colours, and their constant change.
The project wonder on how to operate in the place that hosts it starting from a cognitive understanding and a subsequent figurative representation of the landscape by the individual (the designer / Homo Figurans). The architectural object has the aim of giving the individual the opportunity to interact with the architectural space / object in the same way in which it interacts with the landscape.
Territory: Sea as a “Homeric” element of separation
The Sea, an element with which the human being has an archaic relationship. The observation points chosen are those of two Homeric figures; HIM and HER, respectively on the sea and on the shore. “The sense of the woman-earth that transmits life; and the sense of sterility of the man alone, excluded from the natural cycle of procreation. “3 In this Homeric scene, HIM is far away, him is at sea, HER is waiting for HIM, waiting on the shore.
HIM and HER are figures, figures useful to reveal ambiguity in understanding places. My / our understanding of a place always passes through an “inside” (my memory) and an “outside” (what I see)4.
HIM (outside), HER (inside).
1. Homo Figurans and Homo Faber, terms used by Eugenio Turri in The landscape as a theater 2001
2. Eugenio Turri, The landscape as a theater, 2001
3. Italo Calvino about Cesare Pavese poetry
4. Italo Calvino, Dall’opaco, Published in La strada di San Giovanni, 1971
Project Soundscape