The photographic survey proposed here stems from both a physical and mental operation aimed at understanding what we mean today when considering the workers' district of Rebbio, located in the first peripheral belt of the city of Como.

The peripheral architectural landscape was entirely analyzed by following the boundary or outer perimeter of the area, where the imposing rationalist suburban project by Terragni and Sartoris from 1938 was hypothetically meant to arise. Each dwelling was transformed, according to the codes of photography, into an object of study. The route begins on Via Pasquale Paoli, continues along Via Cecilio, crosses Via Giuseppe di Vittorio, and concludes on Via Varesina, thus completing the outer loop.

Using photography as a device for serial, impersonal, and rigorous recording, the aim was to capture a visual testimony with silver salts that is impartial and free from architectural or aesthetic judgments. Each building, arranged in sequence according to its actual order of appearance, was analyzed frontally and aseptically, with the same dignity and suspension of judgment necessary to understand a spatial context without preconceptions.

This conceptual operation aims to build a contemporary para-archaeological archive of minor architecture, largely overlooked and abandoned to the amnesic action of time’s oblivion. It bears witness, almost a century later, to the heterogeneous and self-constituted urban landscape that exists here and now, in contrast to what could have been according to the ideal project by Terragni and Sartoris.