Factual Complex. Peter Zumthor’s Thermal Baths

Abstract

The text will start from the origins of the “critical regionalism” denomination to investigate the consequences of the “operational” approach to the history of contemporary architecture. In particular, I will start from the new framework in which the role of architecture today arises and from how this derives a need for an overall "repositioning" of the architect and his culture which requires, in addition to a change in responsibility and age, tools also reconsideration of the architectural events that preceded us and of the approach to their analysis. I will consider how the “regionalistic” position of many characters has produced a double consideration of the events of a modernity that today more than ever appears unique, multifaceted and useful perhaps more for what it contained “marginal” than for its mainstream. Finally, I will deal with an attitude, in the past practiced by architects, that of the construction of a “history” useful for the trade, now almost completely abandoned, and the risks that derive from this.

Keywords

• topografia
• tettonica
• regionalismo