New Concordia Island Contest
July 27th, 2012
In recent decades the dissemination and accentuationof the perception of disaster have fueled insecurity and collective fear by encouraging the development of technicist rhetoric, that uses engineering as linear solution to the issues.
Above a certain line of speed and employment of information, a disaster takes such a social and cultural significance that technical knowledge and economies are forced to reorganize themselves exclusively within its logic. The promise of a total security guaranteed by Rhetoric is the answer to the collective fear unleashed by the media.Engineering,using a selective and linear logic, defines itself as normalizer instrument that separates and destroys the possibility of rebuilding a community.
In this way the idea that the city may react to trauma by reorganizing the forms and the sense of community is canceled. It is also destroyed the idea that the crisis can promote the discovery of other ways of living, the new forms taken by landscapes and by the city after the traumatic event. The miseen scene of security involves the mobilization of large capitals and an uncontrolled waste of resources that are removed from the common use. A state of emergency following the collapse is the mode with which the contemporary city is built: suspension of democratic processes, militarization of communities, employment and control of territory through the placement of massive engineering works. The boundary conditions that often lead to the collapse require the articulation of a series of questions to rethink a space to be regained for architecture.
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