Exchange Devices – Luca Sabbadini

Exchange Devices
with Elisa Minisini

“Exchange Devices” is a strategy for an Architecture that is a reflection of the elusive and complex reality of the contemporary city. Looking at the urban issue from a different perspective, we want to question the overall institutionalized project methodologies, inquiring about the possibility of developing new devices, to respond to the problems of reusing abandoned territories of the city, such as the Old Port of Trieste. The instrument we used to manage this complexity is the Diagram, a device that can represent and conduct a wide range of information, capable at the same time of being precise and imprecise, simplifying and highlighting complex phenomena. The transformation from analytical diagram to generative diagram (program) takes place through simple geometrical-projection operations, that condense all the data and the dependences in a single device. Even with a strong spatial value, it is to be understood as dimensionless (it doesn’t define the size nor the shape of the future building, but the spatial relationships and the functional variability). The “skeleton” (core) of the building is defined by the concatenation of the different sections distributed along the main route (spine/guideline). The Architectural result is a building that loses its connotation of container, becoming a transitional space, a moving space, a passing-through device. It is no longer a boundary box, but a sensitive, flexible, developing structure, an organism which rebels against closed, unique and defined forms, in favor of a hybrid and cross-cutting nature. The porosity originates movement and transformation, the relationship between public and private spaces, interior and exterior; it becomes the rule by which manage spatially-different sections, cut from the generative diagram, to help indeterminate situations. In this highly unstable and undetermined structure, we identified some less-probabilistic key points that, similarly to what we analyzed in the city, will define the functional cores, to catalyze the project and the context. The reticular system, incorporated and combined to the architectural “skeleton”, gives physicality to the idea of transformation and mobility. It works as a transformation machine that emphasizes the transitional feature of the building, serving as both transport device and Ruler for the development of Architecture, in response to hypothetical and unpredictable future events. The diagram approach allows to design an Architecture that, becoming theoretical and practical method, denies a strict definition, favoring a dynamic and indeterminate system, that translates the concept of emptiness in an extremely high potential.