La forma architettonica dell'identità

All the identities in which a subject can identify himself invariably refer to the two-faced concept of inclusion and exclusion. An identity is affirmed in the same way through belonging to a nucleus or through its opposite and, for both, there are different intensities, from acknowledgment to the deepest passion. In Erik Erikson’s psychoanalytic interpretation, identity is something internal, located in the deep psychic structures of the individual and which, therefore, persists through change. Architecture has the property of marking places, of anthropizing them, of materializing the transforming presence. It is an efficient cause in the elevation of any place to a place of the soul, according to the vector of experience. Experience is precisely the mechanism of change with which the construction of the conscious self takes place and the contradiction with the idea of an intimate persistent identity is resolved by observing the question from a sociological point of view. The concept of change is radical in the genesis of architecture which, through the construction of the project, realizes the intentions of transformation. Therefore, if psychoanalytically we irrevocably belong to places, they sociologically belong to us. This is not a static determinant: what are the mutagenic experiences that architecture imposes? Through what channels do they lead to that identity belonging or to that same exclusion, to the point of being able to speak of direct responsibility for architecture? The relationship with the ancestral factor is, in contemporary times, transferred to the private space. What historically has been the tradition has become the set of uses of the personal context that, according to the logic of living, animates the architectural places of intimate inclusion, such as the family home, those of logical inclusion, the native city, and those of emotional inclusion, the affective landscape. The notable product of this transfer is not de-standardization but, unpredictably, a non-historical characterization. The evolutional factor is an expression of the relational evolution of the person which gives rise to the progressive process of cultural appropriation. It presides over the conscious identification of certain places of real or, above all, fictitious memory, which become one’s own. In the contemporary world, this can be expanded to include as intellectual residues and not necessarily material, the architectures of the recent past, which no longer belong to us on the level of intention but are elements proper to places and, as such, are chosen or rejected. The representative factor, through which architecture is a mimetic process in itself, where it is a model. The political form of the state (e.g. the Palace of Justice, the Prefecture, the barracks, etc.), the characterization of the group identity (e.g. the stadium, the theater, the school, etc.) are elements of the inclusion and exclusion and, as such, manifestations of the sense of identity. Within these forms of the conscious self, architecture is a fundamental and indispensable part of the concept of inclusion and both on the physical level, as on the theoretical.