Marco Sironi
House of Rituals. Guest university - TU/e (The Netherlands)
From the first demarcation made by the human circle around an event, architecture dedicated to memory and celebration of life and death had been essential in the evolution of cultures and civilizations. This tissue that connects humankind over time despite different places, and cultural backgrounds seem to have been forgotten and marginalized especially by Western societies, where capitalistic cities cannot be stopped. Nevertheless, these topics are still present in our daily life assuming altered shapes. It is the case of suicide and its increased numbers how the WHO World Health Assembly has pointed in 2016. Inevitably, the problem of Suicide Behaviour and Attempted suicide is to be considered a spatial and moral question that needs to be [re]-thought and [re]-interpreted.
Hence, the design strategy “House of Rituals” elaborates a contemporary spatial solution to the issues related to the terrible facts of suicide behaviours and suicide attempts.
“House of Rituals” brings together two different groups of people – Suicide Behaviour and terminally ill – with different characteristics and perhaps opposing will, but who share the same destiny, death.
It is an architecture that wants to strip itself from this word, referring only to spaces and forms crystallized from rituals that encourage human activities and a gradient of social interaction.
The sequence of spaces builds a scenario where human activities can take place; the Womb as the most public space, the Fireplace as a social venue, the Well as intimate passage and, the cave as the most personal space where the patient retreats.
The experience is both: a journey and isolated moments at the same time. Each space is unlike, each of them has its’ own atmosphere.
“House of Rituals” provides the ground for a sensory experience that directly can reconstruct the plasticity of the perceptual system, trying to reconnect through rituals people and the individual with the primary experiences of everyday life.
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