Material culture, consumption and indeterminacy in the contemporary city
- Hypothesis.
We are quite clear about what kinf of food, supplies or clothing will go along with us the rest of our days, but we can not determine with certainty where or how we will reach them… The indeterminacy, precisely, has been slowly advancing on everything we had learned about the commercial exchange space. The speed with which our object system undergoes format changes without physical presence forces us to imagine new scenarios. The image associated with the market or its typological correlate has lost weight at the same time as the activities it contains have diversified. Its organization has stopped responding to a functional program -now overflowing and unstable- and its projection over time has been relativized until to the moment that having a market for a single type of consumption is no longer as reassuring as it used to be.
- Objectives.
The workshop “Living Market.” will be the ambit where these transformations will boost the construction of a new agenda for the trade space, thus obliging us to review the extent to which our project tools are still valid. The city -understood as the ideal laboratory where to test this notion of habitat- will be the area of essay that will dialogue with these transformations.
- Exercise.
A building will be projected on the site where today the Gorla Market resides, a neighborhood in Milan that begins a process of incorporating new programs by opening up to the possibility of modifying its identity. It will not work as a building with a single programmatic purpose, it can be a market and -at the same time- much more. We will only project a property: a construction that is denominated in its notarial terms and not through its programs or functions. This kind of zero degree imposed as a starting point will aim to facilitate the appearance of unexpected uses and social groupings.