The Will to Knowledge

Sara Marini, Angela Mengoni
The Will to Knowledge

Keywords
Michel Foucault, biopolitical modernity, library, Umberto Eco, desire

Fifty years ago, Michel Foucault, in La volonté de savoir (1976), described how the mechanisms of the examination of conscience belonging to the pastoral tradition of the 17th century progressively extended to all areas of society, marking the threshold of a biopolitical modernity. Here, the ‘will to knowledge’ is not the subject’s drive for research, but the injunction to bring into the field of knowledge-power those borderline domains of life that had been previously excluded from it: death, birth, sexuality. By the mid-Seventies it was already clear that power was no longer a matter of limita-tion and denial, but of injunction and stimulation of life. Thus, a few years after Foucault’s work, we encounter another text on the inexhaustible drive towards knowledge, its infinite resources of seduction, its lethal traps. With The Name of the Rose (1980), Umberto Eco constructs a thriller whose origin lies in the will to knowledge, with a book at its centre and, surrounding it, the desire of the aspiring initiates in opposition to the strenuous defence mounted by the custodians of tradition; for the reader, meanwhile, a comparable journey unfolds through the multi-layered plot of coded quotations, in one of the greatest examples of a dialogic textual machine, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it. Eco’s novel, structured around the space of a library, becomes – like the ephemeral Strada Novissima, conceived by Paolo Portoghesi in 1980 for the Corderie dell’Arsenale in Venice – a bastion of postmodernity. The design of the archi-tecture that preserves books and documents is, whether pursuing the real or the fantastic, whether through new foundations or the revision of the existing, an exercise in the relationship between bodies in motion through space, objects, and written discourses that set minds in motion: a challenge, therefore, that seeks a balance between the calculated weight of paper and the elevation of thought. Again – and above all – libraries are places of the imagination that produce other images, propose new paths; pre-cisely because they are real, they reveal even more evident connections between tangible things and the images of the world. Books, like characters in a story, wait to be animated, consulted, forgotten, only to be rediscovered, to become the subject of discussion between acquaintances or strangers. Between the disturbing and the poetic, the monumental and the fragile, the ephemeral and the eternal, the will to knowledge challenges and mocks us.

Umberto Eco
Apocalittico

Keywords
book, labyrinth, laugh, signs, net

Short excerpt from Umberto Eco,The Name of the Rose, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, San Diego-New York-London 1983, pp. 491-492.

Emanuele Arielli
Cloud of Unknowing, Cloud of Knowledge

Keywords
opacity, epistemology, mysticism, computational infrastructure, indeterminacy

The image of the cloud is explored as an epistemological device and an imaginative construct oscillating between ignorance and knowledge, form and indeterminacy. Starting from ancient practices such as nephelomancy and the critiques of Lucretius and Aristophanes, the cloud emerges as an ambiguous surface onto which interpretations, superstitions, and cognitive strategies are projected. In contrast, theo-logical and mystical traditions – from the Bible to The Cloud of Unknowing – frame it as the site of a knowledge that arises through concealment, where knowing coincides with the limits of representation. This ambivalence continues into modernity, between taxonomic attempts and resistances to form, up to contemporary computational technologies and digital cloud infrastructures. Here the cloud becomes an operative metaphor for distributed archives and algorithmic systems that produce knowledge precisely through opacity and indeterminacy. Far from being immaterial, the cloud reveals itself as a material and political infrastructure, entangled with new forms of power, surveillance, and cognitive delegation. What emerges is a continuity between the mystical ‘cloud of unknowing’ and the contemporary ‘computational cloud’, both grounded in a shared economy of opacity, in which knowledge is generated through the renunciation of full intelligibility.


Thanasis Lagios
Foucault’s Ec(h)o. The Will to Knowledge in Labyrinthine Libraries

Keywords
heterotopia, language fracture, subject of knowledge, void, truth

Adhering to the format of the Ring section, the contribution brings into relation The Order of Things by Michel Foucault and The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco as two specular figures of a single theoretical ring, at whose center opens the void that separates words and things, beings and names. Drawing on Borges, Foucault identifies in heterotopias the site where language cracks, where classifications waver and the will to know confronts the impossibility of making discourse and truth fully coincide. Eco rearticulates this fracture in the narrative form of the library-labyrinth, where catalogue, lost manuscript, laughter, and forbidden book stage the irreducible excess of being over names. Through Lacan and Agamben, the text shows how this split affects the very subject of knowledge, marked by a constitutive insufficiency of language. The library thus emerges as a heterotopia of knowledge, a space in which or-der is produced together with its own disorder. In its final turn, the essay shows how identity, desire, and sexuality likewise exceed any exhaustive nomination. What emerges is a dimension of truth that inhabits the void of the ring: that which discourse incessantly attempts to fill without ever being able to saturate it.

Luca Merlini
The Jenga® Library or the Tale of the Casemate

Keywords
utopia, Paul Virilio, fragility, monument, Thomas More

The Extra proposes the project of a tale focused on the architecture of the casemate, a warlike structure intended to house and confine the inaccessible Utopia by the English priest Thomas More. Having become over time a repository for subversive and dystopian ideas, the casemate requires an expansion that the author approaches by rejecting the underground solution in favour of a radical reversal: a skin of books wrapping the exterior. Recalling Paul Virilio’s reflections on the use of volumes as protective shields during conflicts, the project transforms the book into a building material, a ‘brick’ fit for revolt. The intervention takes the bunker-church of Sainte-Bernadette du Banlay by Paul Virilio and Claude Parent as its reference, turning the original casemate into a tabernacle imprisoned within its own library. The work stands as a monument to fragility: a shared house where the removal of a single element, as in a game of Jenga®, threatens the entire system, interpreting fragility as the builder of utopia.

Federico Squarcini
The God Bamba and the Bhagavat. On the Tortuous Reversals of the Will not to Know

Keywords
voice, body, memory, oblivion, heteronomy

From the intertwining of the ‘voices’ of the god Bamba and the Bhagavat, a shared texture emerges, converging in delineating the structural lack of the human, driven by the will to know what it does not know and, at the same time, exposed to the necessity of not knowing. The ‘body that wants to know’ unfolds within a space where necessity, will, forms of knowledge, memory, and oblivion contend for the scene, presenting themselves as an intricate conative tangle, impulsive and never definitively ac-complished. Anders’ images and the revelations of the Bhagavadgītā, surveyed in the light of Nie-tzschean and Foucauldian trajectories, bring to the fore the opaque symbiosis between knowledge and ignorance, between vital needs and induced desires, as well as the subject’s inability to become master of its own will. What results are hazardous and ambivalent gestures, exposed to continual reversals, in which the ‘will to know’ reveals itself as an overvalued faculty, constantly burdened by heteronomous forces and by a persistent and tension-laden ‘quarrel’ of wills. Knowledge itself appears as the effect of practices and systems that exceed the subject: the field in which it takes shape thus remains marked by an insoluble tension between the drive toward autonomy and its inevitable subjection.


Adalberto Fernandes
The Prison as the Historical A Priori of Architecture

Keywords
Michel Foucault, Georges Canguilhem, anti-time, clinic architecture, death

Foucault’s thesis – that architectural spaces imprint modes of functioning that persist despite future functional reconfigurations – is more than a defense of the temporal concepts of provenance or precursor. He points to what he calls the ‘historical a priori’, a framework that precedes and limits experience while simultaneously emerging from it. Architecture contributes to this historical a priori by creating spaces that shape our immaterial sense of place, regardless of their physical realities. A key architectural historical a priori is the experience of being bound to a space, even imprisoned within it, independent of the freedom of our physical movements. Foucault’s work thus opens the possibility of assigning architecture the task of imagining ways to live while confronting the necessity of being tied to a space, whatever form it may take.


Antonello Marotta
Interactive Machines, Symbolic Machines

Keywords
archive, symbol, Daniel Libeskind, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, diagram

The archive as a conceptual space and an abstract machine, is explored using the ideas of memory and knowledge as interacting and constantly reformulated elements. The archive is understood as a space in continuous becoming, where knowledge is deconstructed and recomposed in the light of the consciousness of the present, taking on new and unprecedented forms. It is therefore a matter of rethinking knowledge in a diagrammatic way – as an open process rather than an immutable repository. The analysis intertwines with the thought of Michel Foucault, who in the 1970s investigated the complex relationship between power, knowledge, and discourse. Terms such as discourse, archive, apparatus, and biopolitics assume a central role, representing the nodes through which the dynamics of knowledge are articulated within society. The text investigates the Scenic Machines and Connected Machines developed by the Diller + Scofidio studio between the late 1990s and the early 2000s. In parallel, it examines the Symbolic Machines created by Daniel Libeskind for the 1985 Venice Biennale, at the invitation of Aldo Rossi. These spatial mechanisms break the mono-focal vision, opening the observer’s mind to new tools of collective interaction.


Matteo Trentini
The Theoretical Project. Christian Norberg-Schulz and Mediterranean Culture

Keywords
sublime, landscape, Genius Loci, Norvegian Institute of Rome, scandinavian architecture

At the beginning of the 1960s, after the complex affair surrounding the construction of the Norwegian Institute in Rome had come to an end and the family house ‘Italiesin’ in Tuscany had been completed, Christian Norberg-Schulz embarked on a path of theoretical reflection that would progressively lead him to abandon architectural practice. The importance of the Mediterranean context in the intellectual biography of the Norwegian architect Norberg-Schulz takes on the weight of a theoretical project in which Mediterranean culture would not merely be the object of historiographical investigation but, rather, an active material capable of establishing itself as a constant critical reference. In the wake of a dis-satisfaction with contemporary debate, direct contact with Mediterranean culture and environment thus enabled Norberg-Schulz not only to elaborate the culminating concept of his theoretical trajectory, the theory of Genius Loci, but also to verify, among other things, the foundational traits of the Nordic land-scape from which he came.

Alessandra Gabriele
An Ideogrammatic Dictionary by Yona Friedman

Keywords
dictionary, ideograms, communication, woods, library

In 2016, Yona Friedman engraved on the trunks of a walnut grove, in the Pescara countryside, the graphemes that form his dictionary of ideograms, effectively transforming the No Man’s Land woods into an open-air library. These are signs designed by Friedman as a tool to overcome any linguistic bar-rier and democratize access to knowledge. The text reads his Dictionnaire as the result of a long re-search on communication conducted by the Franco-Hungarian architect: through an essential pictographic language, the author has developed, since the 1960s, communicative tools capable of mediating complex concepts to a non-specialist public. Manuals, brochures, and educational materials introduce themes such as the reading of space, housing needs, and active participation in urban transformations. The architect thus assumes the role of mediator, fostering learning based on experience and improvisation.

Guido Mario Morpurgo
The Void in Fullness. The Library-Building of the Shoah Memorial in Milan

Keywords
pre-existence, graft, subtraction, suspension, archetipes

The Library at the Shoah Memorial in Milan is interpreted as a device designed to transform the architecture of memory into a cognitive process. Conceived as a ‘library-machine’ embedded within the first bay of the Central Station, the work is defined by a radical ‘making-space’ that subtracts matter from the pre-existing structure to graft itself. The project echoes the lessons of Milanese Rationalism and the BBPR Group’s Monument at the Monumental Cemetery in Milan. Through archetypal tectonic figures – such as the cube, parallelepiped, cylinder, wall-slab, and foundation-slab – the building establishes a dialogue through distancing with its historical container. The Memorial’s library-machine is therefore based on construction even before architecture: ‘prismatic fringes of a library’ between complementary fields of knowledge have been translated into an architectural volume defined by its exposed structure but at the same time by a virtually borderless appearance thanks to its transparent envelope. It is an expression of the ‘will to know’ as a process and not as an achieved result – an open form, as such.


Giulia Cordin, Eva Leitolf
Negotiating Knowledge. Artistic Research and the Politics of Visibility

Keywords
practice-based knowledge, visual critique, agency of images, epistemic device

The growing institutional legitimization of practice-based artistic research within the humanities is intertwined with its development across different international contexts. Although artistic research is increasingly recognized as a legitimate form of knowledge production, its evaluation often remains bound to criteria derived from the scientific disciplines, highlighting a persistent epistemic hierarchy that privileges textual and numerical forms over visual practices. Considering the rise of contemporary visual culture and the parallel crisis of information generated by an overflow of materials, the need emerges to develop critical and pedagogical tools for interpreting the contemporary mediascape. Through the discussion of artistic and practice-based methodologies, and with reference to the artistic practice of Eva Leitolf, it is shown how such approaches foster the active involvement of the viewer, call dominant regimes of visibility into question, and open new epistemic and political perspectives within academia.

Filippo Lorenzo Balma
Archival Landscapes. The Hidden Fortresses of Knowledge

Keywords
impulse, intersection, surveillance, archive fever, power

Milanese archives are interpreted as machine-landscapes, intertwining memory with information control. From the Milan State Archive to the automated Cittadella, from Aruba’s data centres to the hybrid depots of the Triennale, this itinerary reveals sites where the city negotiates the relationship between knowledge, power, and time. These spaces, often dim and dusty, emerge as fortresses of knowledge, hidden yet vital to Western culture, driven by a pervasive ‘archival impulse’. Conceived as Derridean intersections of topology and normativity, they reveal tensions between preservation, surveillance, and visibility, embodying a contemporary ‘archive fever’ that shapes architecture, urban space, and collective memory.


Redazione Vesper
Rosa, rosae, rosae. The Names of the ‘Forbidden Book’

Keywords
Umberto Eco, linguistic spectre, drawing, traces, name as survival

Of Aristotle’s Poetics, only the first book survives, devoted to tragedy and epic poetry. The second part, supposedly dedicated to comedy and the pleasure of laughter, survives instead as a lost, desired, and forbidden object around which the plot of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose is constructed. Although it is the cause of the seven murders narrated in the novel, the book itself is directly named only at the close of the story. Its presence operates instead through the words that surround it, through traces, clues, and indirect denominations, from its position within the library to the material consistency of its parchment, from the effects it produces to the keys of access that allow it to be consulted. The drawing thus traverses the 530 pages of the first Bompiani edition in order to catalogue these nominal appearances and to restore the second book of the Poetics as a linguistic spectre, revealing how, of what disappears, only the name remains, and how only the word can still give form to what no longer exists: rosa, rosae, rosae.

Corrado Di Domenico
The Unavowable Will of Form

Keywords
impulse,metamorphosis, cosmic garden, plastic form, geometry, unconscious

In art and architecture, form is configured as an original principle of knowledge, capable of connecting symbolic, material, and cosmic dimensions. It is not a static outcome but a dynamic and “formative” process, unfolding through metamorphosis, resonating in the relations it produces, and residing in the immanence of its internal tensions. From archaic and mythic models to contemporary experimentations, form acts as a generative device that structures space and orients thought, intertwining geometry and or-ganism within a single evolutionary logic. Architecture, in particular, emerges as a practice capable of duplicating and reinterpreting the world, constructing configurations that transcend time and contingent use. Formal research draws on intuition, perception, and abstraction, activating a non-linear yet recur-sive form of knowledge in which the visible and the invisible interpenetrate. In this perspective, form becomes an autonomous field of inquiry, a site of continuous transformation, and a fundamental in-strument of creative knowledge.


Nicoletta Grillo, Hilde Van Gelder, Joeri Verbesselt
Re-membering the Coast. Three Environmental Art Trails

Keywords
liminal space, interspecies communication, vegetal co-creation, iconic emergence, ecological awareness

The coast is conceived as a liminal space in which land and sea become generative of knowledge medi-ated through material, ecological, and cultural interactions. Beyond the environmental amnesia induced by tourism and its infrastructures, the coast is understood, here, as an active agent and a living archive capable of guiding environmental art research that integrates artistic practices, environmental art history, and embodied engagement, in order to reactivate processes of ‘remembering’. In this framework, different modes of environmental agency emerge: interspecies communication, vegetal co-creation, and the use of light as a critical medium. The notion of ‘iconic emergence’ supports the unexpected appearance of connections between past and present, while the use of intuition and wild thinking expands its epistemological paradigms. Research thus becomes a relational praxis that redefines the role of the re-searcher and promotes new forms of ecological awareness and shared memory.


Alice Covatta
Knowledge, Crisis, and Society. Changes in the Public Library

Keywords
refuge library, socio-ecological crisis, public space, third space, social infrastructure

The journey explores the contemporary public library in its attempt to respond to a variety of ecological and social needs, while preserving its original mission as a space dedicated to knowledge. In this scenario, swept up in the whirlwind of new uses and meanings affecting the contemporary metropolis, which figures embody the ‘will to know’ in the new millennium? Linking the life of the library to that of the community, three events and three projects are analysed: the Yusuhara Library, the Sendai Mediateque, and the Sant Antoni Joan Oliver Library. Each architecture responds to a socio-ecological reality in crisis, sometimes through innovative architectural concepts, sometimes through pure pragmatism, and sometimes through a hybrid of both.

Fosco Lucarelli
The Cultural and Architectural Legacy of the José Hierro Public Library by Ábalos & Herreros

Keywords
ornament, decorated shed, written architecture, symbol, Peter Halley

The José Hierro Public Library (Madrid, 2002) by Iñaki Ábalos and Juan Herreros embodies their ethos of formal restraint in a compact, plinth-mounted volume, asserting a quiet landmark in Usera. A vast interior void, uninterrupted by structure, organises circulation, while the uniform cladding and irregular windows conceal the steel frame, producing a deliberately non-tectonic expression. Occasional brise-soleils and Peter Halley’s digitally altered pages from Borges’s The Library of Babel animate the interior and subtly extend outward, creating a dialectical tension between the abstract volume and content, ex-pressed through the building’s façade.


Miriam Pistocchi
Biopolitics of the Great Number. The 14th Milan Triennale

Keywords
14th Milan Triennale, 1968, protest, mass society, disciplinary society

In The Will to Knowledge Michel Foucault describes how, beginning in the seventeenth century, two forms of power – anatomo-politics, or discipline, and bio-politics – came to permeate the everyday lives of individuals, aiming to manage, organize, and administer life and the forces of the population. Drawing on photographs and documents preserved in the Triennale Milano Archives, this article explores the relationship between the management of life in mass societies and the events surrounding the 14th Milan Triennale, dedicated to the issues of the ‘large number’ and occupied on its opening day by a group of protesters amid the political climate of 1968. Between the exhibition’s themes and its occupation stands the installation by Saul Bass and Herb Rosenthal, conceived as a labyrinth of archive-partition walls. The exhibition embodies the unease of living in a world that is entirely organized and standardized, where the only possible way out lies in the capacity to maintain a creative attitude and an autonomy of thought.


Mingru Han
The Will to Observe. Roadway Observation Society and Post-1968 Japan

Keywords
urban object, Zenkyōtō, Hyperart, politics, gaze

The emergence of the Roadway Observation Society (Rojō Kansatsu Gakkai, 1986) is interpreted as a particular response to Japan’s post-1968 intellectual and political scene. Formed by Genpei Akasegawa, Terunobu Fujimori, Shinbo Minami and others, the Society transformed the leftovers of urbanization into sites of critical observation. In the wake of the failed Zenkyōtō movement, Akasegawa redirected political disillusionment toward the everyday, developing the notion of ‘Hyperart’ or ‘Thomassons’ through the discovery of purposeless urban objects. These remnants, read through David Harvey’s ‘Spatial Fix,’ expose capitalism’s cycles of investment and decay. While Foucault’s turn from the gaze to discourse marked a departure from phenomenology, Akasegawa and the Roadway Observation Society articulated a more immanent relation between perception and the material relationship – seeking emancipatory “visibilities” that distance us from the status quo.


Adekunle Adeyemo
Embodied Knowledge. The Hezekiah Oluwasanmi Library

Keywords
epiphenomenon, Nigeria, climatic architecture, Arieh Sharon, Obafemi Awolowo University

The Archive presents the knowledge embodied in a library building, through the case of the Hezekiah Oluwasanmi Library (HOL), Obafemi Awolowo University (formerly University of Ife), Ile-Ife, Nigeria. Archival and historical evidence suggest that HOL embodies architectonic, climatic, cultural, campus planning, and historical ‘knowledges’, each opening vistas for exploration. Architectonically, the build-ing embodies knowledge of Renaissance architecture and modernism’s attention to form, manifestoes, and exterior articulations. The climatic knowledge embodied in the building are unique responses to the Tropical climate of southwest Nigeria, where it is located. Cultural knowledge of the Yoruba people, its original patrons is embodied in sculptural and ornamental elements, while university campus planning knowledge is encoded in the HOL’s location. It also embodies historical knowledge through its name. Not merely alluding to these ‘knowledges’, HOL creates a will to knowledge as it arouses visitors’ curiosity, prompting education about knowledge beyond its books and resources.


Riccardo Segradin
Roots of Modernity. Design, Medicine, and Control

Keywords
Henry Richardson, Frederick Olmsted, Buffalo, State Asylum, Kirkbride Plan

The collaboration between Henry Hobson Richardson, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the physician John Purdue Gray reverberates in the definition of an integrated model linking architecture, landscape, and medical science in the second half of the 19th century. The Buffalo State Asylum (1869-1889) and Buffalo’s urban park system (1868-1876) constitute a laboratory in which the therapeutic rationality in-spired by the Kirkbride Plan merges with Olmsted’s landscaping vision and Richardson’s architectural experimentation. Both part of William Dorsheimer’s political project, the projects share the intention of regenerating the city through spatial order and the harmonious relationship between nature and the built environment. The Buffalo experience, interpreted in the light of Foucault’s ‘will to know’, reveals how architecture becomes an instrument of control, discipline, and care, anticipating the hygienic-social demands of the Modern Movement.

Andrea Gritti
Anopticon

Keywords
Panopticon, Cacopedia, Minority Report, Umberto Eco, prison

The ‘Anopticon’ is a device theorized by Umberto Eco as part of the ‘Cacopedia’ project, here interpreted as a radical political counterpart to Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Panopticon’. Defined as a machine à laisser faire, the ‘Anopticon’ inverts the spatial mechanisms of the Benthamite apparatus: whereas in the ‘Panopticon’ model the gaze acts as an instrument of disciplinary control exerted by power over detainees, in Eco’s device the isolated jailer becomes the observed subject, while the prisoners enjoy freedom of movement and invisibility. The study compares Eco’s literary description with the architectural drawings of William Reveley and the historical prison models of the American Midwest, subsequently extending the analysis to the science-fiction speculation of Minority Report. Here, the ‘Anopticon’ evolves into a predictive and digital surveillance system, where vision anticipates the future and realizes the ideal of the jailer’s total de-responsibility, thus outlining the features of a new and complex heterotopia.


Luca Zecchin
Deposits (Knowledge Logistics)

Keywords
storage, Clorindo Testa, library infrastructure, power device, biblioteche

Library storage systems and material handling technologies are read as infrastructures that determine the configuration of the experience of knowledge. This traces a lineage that intersects industrial logistics and architecture, beginning with the case of the National Library of Buenos Aires, where Clorindo Testa elevates the storage space into an underground artificial sarcophagus and generative core of the project. Through the analysis of paradigmatic models such as Perrault’s BNF and Jahn’s Mansueto Library, it is shown how the separation between public space and storage ensures safety and preservation, concentrat-ing social and consultation functions in the visible part of the library. The warehouses and their logistics determine the spatial configuration of the library, transforming it into an environment sustained by an invisible organization that redefines the hierarchy of knowledge spaces and radically alters perceptual and intellectual experience. The storage functions as a device of power which, oscillating between concealment and iconic display, modulates access to knowledge and defines new spatial and symbolic postures of the contemporary library.


Niloofar Amini
Between Will to Know and Will not to Know. Reading Afsaneh Najmabadi’s Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards

Keywords
Gender Studies, Iranian culture, post-colonial Modernity, erasure, sexuality

Afsaneh Najmabadi’s book Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards, is here read as a crucial intervention in Iranian historiography and gender studies. The Fundamental explores the epistemic shift triggered by Iran’s encounter with Western modernity: Within the aesthetic and social life of the time – especially in poetry, painting, and courtly sociability – beauty rather than gender structured desire. These figures were admired, and celebrated, forming part of a broader culture in which sexual acts ex-pressed hierarchy, and power rather than fixed identity. Through a comparison with Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, the author highlights the tension between the Western will to know and the Iranian will not to know: a deliberate erasure through which homoerotic traditions and fluid gender expressions were purged from cultural memory in the pursuit of modernity. This tension between the will to knowwill not to know provides a fertile ground for rethinking how sexuality and gender operate under different regimes of power, critically questioning the amnesias of post-colonial modernity.


Anna Ghiraldini
Knowledge on Wheels

Keywords
Enzo Mari, exhibition, Bompiani, communication, social design

In Enzo Mari’s project for a mobile library, commissioned by the publishing house Bompiani, the idea of the circulation of culture in post-Second World War Italy emerges. The vehicle, designed in 1956 and equipped with display cases, shelves, and a small internal reading room, is conceived to bring books to Italian provinces lacking bookstores, turning the means of transport into a travelling shop, an exhibition space, and a true bridge between citizens and culture. This dimension is situated within the overall arc of Mari’s career, oriented toward intersecting languages with the possibility of social emanci-pation mediated by knowledge and learning. These features outline the core of the author’s design re-search, which is consistently concerned with combining scientific rigor with its highest ethical value, deployable for social purposes.


Alberto Grassetti
The Archive of the Renzo Piano Foundation. A Design Machine

Keywords
machine of knowledge, memory, secret library, documents, sedimentation

In an industrial warehouse in Genoa lies the operational center of Renzo Piano’s design memory: the ar-chive of the Renzo Piano Foundation. Far from the iconic spaces of Punta Nave, this is where a vast and heterogeneous body of materials is preserved. These resources nourish the architect’s knowledge and creative process. Founded in 2004, the Foundation operates as a ‘living archive’, both a tool for transmitting knowledge and an operational support for design practice. In this context, archiving does not merely mean preserving but generating knowledge through continuous processes of sedimentation and re-elaboration. Through the analysis of selected case studies, is here shown how the archive – far from being a static repository – acts as an active engine for new architectures, a true machine of knowledge in which memory and design merge within a circular process.


Camila Mancilla
The Light Table

Keywords
transparency, Gordon Matta-Clark, collage, devices, screens

The use of light table in architecture it is a formative interface, half tool, half stage, that converts light into method. On its plane, drawings can be overlaid, cut, and sutured; hidden geometries and temporal seams are coaxed into view. The light table and the contemporary computer screen are not opposites but relatives in a single lineage of ‘seeing-through’ in architectural culture. Both are devices that fuse illu-mination and inscription, both promise legibility, and both risk flattening difference in the name of clarity. The difference is ethical and haptic: the light table enforces a practice of exposure in which seams, tape, grain, and dust become part of the argument, while the screen tends to conceal its joins. If the screen is emissive – light thrown at the eye – the light table is trans-illuminative – light pulled through matter. The former excels at simulation, the latter at diagnosis. Keeping architecture intellectually honest requires holding both within a single practice while refusing the erasure of joins.


Miriam Rejas Del Pino
A Place to Read. Wolfgang Tillmans at the BPI - Centre Pompidou

Keywords
public knowledge, visual atlas, topology, spatialisation, semiotics

The Wolfgang Tillmans’s exhibition Nothing could have prepared us – Everything could have prepared us at the Bibliothèque Publique d’Information (BPI) is analysed through a semiotic lens. The public li-brary, conceived as a space of knowledge, is reconfigured as a visual dispositif in which reading and seeing coincide. Across the horizontal line of tables, shelves and residual furnishings, and the vertical axis of the populated walls, Tillmans composes an extended ‘atlas’ where meaning emerges from the topological relations of spatialised images. Drawing on semiotic theory and Foucauldian thought, the article shows how the visitor’s trajectory enacts a passage from the virtuality of meaning to its discursive manifestation. The exhibition thus reimagines the library as a laboratory of public knowledge, in which movement, montage and contingent encounters with images become the very conditions of meaning.


Alessandro Canevari, Francesca Paoli
The President as Client. Building Myths, Mythmaking Buildings

Keywords
presidential library, memory, monument, legacy, civic ritual

A presidential library is more than an archive; it’s a monument where architecture scripts collective memory. What was once considered un-American – a president designing his own shrine – has become a central aspect of the presidency. Each library transforms governance into narrative through a curated space, revealing the President as the primary client, commissioning not only preservation but also performance, staging their legacy as a civic ritual. Yet architectural narration is never neutral. These buildings curate myths as much as history, turning omission into structure. Roosevelt omitted internment, Johnson sealed surveillance, Reagan veiled Iran-Contra, Nixon reframed Watergate. In Austin, Gordon Bunshaft’s travertine Great Hall, lined with red archival boxes that are both visible and withheld, trans-forms bureaucracy into theater. Here, absence is designed, memory choreographed. Such libraries em-body what Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called the ‘imperial presidency’: authority extended into architecture; democracy translated into monument. Each is a final campaign – a last bid for immortality through form.