After successful completion of the course, students are able to attain a broader understanding of architecture, not only as a discipline aimed at the realization of buildings but also as a device of architectonic thinking that concerns and connects both material and immaterial domains of production and theory.
According to the Cambridge Dictionary, to show is "to make it possible for something to be seen." A show is a spectacle, "an event at which a group of related things are available for the public to look at." Schauen, its German kin, means instead "to look at something." The two meanings are similar, and yet their sense is antithetical. The word draw the same path, but they cross it in opposite directions. To show also means "to prove something or make the truth or existence of something known:" the act of showing is intrinsically related to scientific discovery. Werner Heisenberg, the "father" of the uncertainty principle, characterized the content of quantum mechanics as anschaulich. However, a show is also "an appearance of something that is not really sincere or real;" something to be mistrusted, like the eidola, the shadow cast by the puppets in Plato's cave. Truth and falsehood, science versus fiction: once again, one path and two opposing senses. The course will investigate the "space" opened up by these antitheses. It will do so by looking at figures and analogies that help articulate such apparent contradictions, from philosophy to theology and from natural science to architecture theory. These figures will be treated not within an analytical or a dialectical perspective but through an interest in the architectonic method. It will imply finding a path and making a way that, as the frame of the overall module suggests, pertains to a "meta" domain: a domain not of solutions but resolutions, not of tools but of instruments, not of facts but of cases.
The course will develop through a series of lectures. The lectures will be held in English.
Written exam.