Corridoi: demiurgici sguardi e frammenti di esistenza

A place for encounters and confrontations, the corridor is a philosophical place par excellence, to the extent that it gathers the sediment of an epistemological conflict that imposes itself in architectural forms on man’s daily life. Between its walls, the geometric spatiality of order and of the perspective that controls everything is traversed by the continuous flow of existence, of fortuitous and unexpected knowledge, of becoming, of waiting. A sort of interval in the inhabitant’s existence, seen through the absolute, demiurgic eye of perspective, coexists with the interior site of small moments, of fragments of that same existence seen from the inside. The result of the architecture of reason, the corridor contains multiple aspects as a site of transit and a site of order, distribution, and rational organization. Initially opposed, the corridor would have to wait for a ‘modern’ mentality for it to expand to public buildings. The corridor then gradually imposed itself in the articulation of the ‘revolutionary’ bourgeois dwelling with its rooms divided by scrupulous protocols – those of hygiene, convenience and decorum – which impose a distancing between private and public life. Only in the nineteenth century would Cartesian perspectivism agree to only accept the evidence of mathematical logic and the geometric scheme imposed by perspective on reality as formal instruments of technological intentionality. The divorce between metaphysics and reason thus functionalized Euclidean geometry by depriving it of its residual symbolic content and ushered in the era of descriptive geometry that, systematically reducing reality to two dimensions, made the Industrial Revolution possible. Without the encounter at infinity of the parallels of Euclid’s Fifth Postulate and perspective understood as an invisible hinge between projections, the modern technological world could not have existed, nor could have the corridor in the way that the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presented it. The enfilade of rooms typical of hierarchical thought and the social hierarchy that had been dominant up to that moment thus leaves room for the taxonomic order of the ascending efficiency-oriented bourgeoisie, giving rise to a device whose history has yet to be written.