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5.1 / San Lorenzo / Isometrics

5.1 / San Lorenzo / Section

5.1 / San Lorenzo / Plans

5.1 / San Lorenzo / Facade Digital Model

5.1 / San Lorenzo / Digital Section Model

5.1 / San Lorenzo / Working Plans

The project examines Giorgio Agamben's concept of bare life and the politicising of human life in the context of the modern refugee settlement. It considers the Italian political landscape as a marker for a situation which has seen a rise to political dominance globally. In Politics, Aristotle argued for humans as innately political beings and for the state as a natural construct insofar as it “comes to be for the sake of life, and exists for the sake of the good life”. Agamben would suggest that this statement necessarily constitutes human form-of-life as political life, and so delineates between the two definitions of life found in ancient Greek: zoē or the biological life-form and bios or qualitative form-of-life. He argues that life, exposed to the states of exception characteristic of contemporary biopower, increasingly resembles bare life —the state in which natural, zoē life is politicised. And further, that it is biopolitical governance, conceived within states of exception, that produces the bare life of reduced rights and freedoms. The role of architecture as an apparatus in the production of bare life, then, is the focus of this project and leads to the conception of bare space — that is, an architecture which instigates and maintains bare life. Biopolitical history has seen architecture’s increasing interest in bare space, culminating with the concentration camp systems of the 20th century's totalitarian regimes, however contemporary examples can be found in modern prisons, refugee settlements and asylum detention centres. Due to it’s close proximity to the North African coastline, Italy has experienced an influx of asylum seekers fleeing internal conflicts across the African continent who make the clandestine voyage across the Mediterranean Sea toward Italy’s southern extent, where they are typically intercepted and taken into detention to await processing. This amounts to the reconstruction of identity and a loss of the individual to the refugee population. From there, many refugees move north through the country seeking employment or entry to other European nations, however, often unable to attain either, many find themselves languishing in urban settlements in cities across Italy — Firenze being no exception. It is in such settlements that the actuality of bare life encroaches on this marginalised population and strands them in a legal state of exception. The project proposes a new typology for the urban refugee settlement in the form of an inhabitable wall affixed to the frontage of the existing San Lorenzo Church. The wall represents the contemporary camp. A monolithic exterior betrays an interior labyrinth of infinite vertical expanse, where uniform stairwells puncture the greater architecture and serve the dual purpose of providing discontinuous circulation between programmatically segregated floors and acting as shifting boundary elements which divide the superstructure vertically and creates two isolated volumes which house the sexes separately. The volumes stagger and interlock with one another as they rise up to cover the existing facade, and although a physical connection never exists between the two, there are instances of partial visual and aural connection between the volumes as well as with the church and piazza. Here we find reference to Ferdinando Fuga’s project the Albergo dei Poveri, which similarly employed architecture to divide demographic groups, but did so instead with horizontal discontinuity. At the base of the tower, a permeable parlour level provides an entryway to the existing church and segregated entries into each of the tower’s volumes, which are accessible only by ceding one’s citizenship. From there the complex arrangement of stairwells provides a single possible circulation path to each of the building's floors — each assigned a program of bare space: sleeping, eating, sanitation, bathing, production, ceremony and meditation/worship. The interior spatial dimensions are anatomically determined, agreeing with standardised architectural data (Neufert’s), so as to provide the minimum space for the intended function of each floor and for each demographic group. The functioning and expansion of the building is provided by a totally abstracted labor which sees the inhabitants perform tasks which indirectly maintain everything from the lighting and heating systems, to the production of food, to the continued construction of the vertical settlement in which they live. The project serves to critique architecture’s part in the creation of the refugee as a separate, bare population and in propagating the false temporality of their condition. Within the wall, the inhabitants (refugees, insofar as they have been excluded from society) are reduced to bare life by the absurd bureaucracy of the architecture; a composition of bare space which precisely dictates movement whilst creating the illusion of freedom. This dichotomy of apparent possibility and rigid actuality sits analogous to the absurdist framing of the human search for purpose — a paradoxical reality produced and weaponised by the state of exception in order to strip the inhabitants of any potentiality. And in denying this fundamental freedom, the tower becomes an architecture of exception.