Scenario

The Ark is a rhetorical expedient in the same way that the archipelago, the sea, the ocean, or the primordial soup is or could be: metaphors that serve to construct the narration of the following brief theoretical-methodological essay, which deals with the possible countermeasures to the explosion of urban and semi-urban phenomena. Assuming that the perception of the physical environment is a mental and cultural construct consisting of a cluster, or collection, of related concepts, the book embarks on the process of re-semanticizing the lexicon of architecture and of the city, exploiting the metaphor as a supportive instrument for a formal reading of urban facts. In addition to the numerous references to the terraqueous substance of the urban environment, this book contains — in essence — the promise of a new dialectic and a new contract between primary urban facts and the generic pattern of the contemporary city. Borrowed from physical geography, the terraqueous metaphors allow to contend with the realm of human geography, testing its capacities to translate and restructure the fragmented, diffuse, disperse and multipolar form of the city. Water, sea and ocean hold together the reference to the Ark and the archipelago: constituting a sort of palimpsest of places and spaces from which the idea of navigation derives, with the — inevitable — risk of shipwrecks and the consequential necessity of surviving on a limited amount of resources.