The form of absence. Reflections on the city, memory, and monuments, starting from Luigi Snozzi’s project for Brunswick, Germany

Abstract

When architecture is called to give shape to what is no longer there, the art of building faces the challenge of transposing the emptiness of loss into an image. It then finds itself having to fix a certain temporal segment within the dynamic flow of collective memory, to root the event it has been asked to represent within the specific character of a place, to define a precise image – among the many possible ones – which contributes to locating that trauma within the choral narrative it is a part of. By questioning the potential implicit in the intimate link that exists between construction and destruction, we come face to face with a reflection on the relationship between memory and the city, starting from an investigation around a project in which an erased urban reality is reconstructed in the negative in the ground, like an imprint, while it itself is translated into a monument.

Keywords

• figurazione
• monumento
• eterotopia