CIRICE 2018_Session D5_Inside, beside but other than the city. Places and architectures of isolation among re-signification, conservation and problems of fruition

Since ancient times, the limitation of personal freedom has found in the city and in its boundaries places and forms of architecture aiming at accommodating those who must interrupt relationships with the community permanently or temporarily. Exclusion from the outside world assumes, over the centuries, different characters in relation to descending from voluntary or involuntary retreats as well as from its purposes: religious and spiritual ones, with the definition of sites dedicated to hermitage and monastic seclusion; social ones, linked to the forced removal of individuals from the community and to their confinement within 'secret' spaces, prisons or psychiatric hospitals; political ones, with the implementation of coercive systems, based on physical and psychic violence, through prison, labor, concentration and extermination camps.
If internal to the consolidated city, detention architectures as well as the monastic-conventual ones assume an immediate perceptive recognizability from the morphological and iconic point of view in the urban context for the same reasons related to their original functions, thus becoming "cities other” than the city. When external to the urban asset, places of isolation assume, indeed, meanings associated with the indispensable self-sufficiency and, often, with their arduous accessibility.
The mentioned forms of architecture, often characterized by very rigid and repeating distribution features, lost their original functions in current times, pose multiple and delicate issues that are object of investigation, together with case-studies, in the proposed Session in relation to their transmissibility to the future; primarily ethical and cultural issues, referring to the limits and legitimacy of intervention on the existing parts as well as to the meanings – in a negative and positive sense – that can be transferred through conservation and reuse. In parallel, acting on this heritage today poses complex challenges of technical and design order, linked to its possible transformability, improvement of accessibility and insertion of new functions within often historically multilayered architecture.

The Session is included in the 8th International Congress:

La Città Altra / The Other City

Storia e immagine della diversità urbana: luoghi e paesaggi dei privilegi e del benessere, dell’isolamento, del disagio, della multiculturalità

History and image of urban diversity: places and landscapes of privileges and welfare, of seclusion, discomfort and multiculturalism

that will take place in the Department of Architecture of the University of Naples Federico II (Palazzo Gravina) from 25th to 27th October 2018.

Authors interested in participating should send an abstract by January 15, 2018. Terms and details will be announced shortly (on the Open Conference System) (see http://www.iconografiacittaeuropea.unina.it/index.php/9-attivita/47-cirice-2018).

The acceptance of the abstracts will be communicated to the authors by February 15, 2018.