"Sintomatologia aeroportuale. Arrivi e partenze in una foresta"

Abstract:

Drawing on the first and most fundamental of Dipesh Chakrabarty's well-known Four Theses, this contribution reflects on how, in light of the anthropogenic causes behind today's ecological and environmental crisis, the traditional dichotomy between the "two histories" – that of human affairs and that of so-called natural affairs – is progressively collapsing. Since early modernity, these two domains have been regarded as separate; yet the current crisis reveals their increasing interdependence. As a consequence, even the "two architectures" historically derived from this dualism are now converging, no longer distinguishable in the context of contemporary architectural practice. On one side, the mineral-based architecture, typically referred to simply as "architecture" and traditionally focused on inert, human-centered constructs; on the other, "landscape architecture", which has always paid closer attention to living environments and non-human materials. Among the most symptomatic spaces of this post-collapse architectural condition are airports – once emblematic of artificiality and engineering-driven design, now increasingly reinterpreted within ecological frameworks. This paper proposes a transnational and multi-scalar critique of recent airport projects that have challenged the classical conception of airport space, reimagining it in line with a broader "forest turn" currently emerging in architectural and urban design discourses.

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