Vesper No. 6 | Magic | Spring-Summer 2022
Angela Squassina
The Arcane Language
of the Material Trace. A Temporal Exploration of Architecture through
Stratigraphy
In Notre-Dame
de Paris Victor Hugo defined architecture as the greatest stone book ever
wrote, whose shapes and symbols melt knowledge and education.
Alongside
this iconic and intentional language – either refined or
popular, essoteric or esoteric, as much differentiated as anyway shared and
culturally mediated – buildings offer us a further hieroglyphic key
to understanding, namely through the material signs stratifying over time.
Thus
architectural stratigraphy, rather than a simple archaeologic technique, can be
regarded as a peculiar gaze focussing on the matter of buildings and allowing a
temporal exploration of ancient architectures, both through a diachronic and
synchronic approach.
Applying
both to reason and to perception and to emotion either, stratigraphy, while
suggesting a taking-care approach to heritage, stirs a reflection beyond the
technical and about the cultural meaning of the preservation project.
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