Dall'astuccio al bunker. L'interno-sarcofago come controforma della macchina-sottomarino: cosa contiene cosa?

Re-thinking the theme of the bunker means first of all reflecting on a habitable space transformed into pure technological counterform. This paradoxical topic questions all the categories that have historically given life to interior space: the sizes and materials adapted to human uses, the idea of comfort, and the dialogue with context. A subsequent fundamental question arises: how did we get here? Bunkers are created by the development of construction techniques due to the systematic use of two fast-setting materials: reinforced concrete and steel. Furthermore, a sophisticated design of containers for mechanical apparatuses with atypical shapes and increasingly large dimensions developed. The theme of the special container dimensioned on the machines is the expression of the Benjaminian universe of the interieur, of the cases and of all the morphological figures based on the principle of the memory of the imprint. These boxes, thanks to the ductility and lightness of the steel constructions, can expand and become Passages, dreamlike figures that create sophisticated spatio-temporal mirages, optical-perceptual instruments of the relationship between memory and modification. Concrete constructions also respond to the need to give shape to industrial architectures characterised by the transit of the vehicles they house: dry docks as counter-forms of ships, large railway stations, and hangars for airships. This process originates from the morphological declinations of original interior space at the different scales of the object and of architecture: from the anthropomorphic sarcophagus of Tutankhamon to the cartonnages of the Ptolemaic period. It is therefore possible to trace a genealogy of architectures and artefacts of reinforced concrete bunker-sarcophagus in a variety of morphological precursors, themselves buildings-machines and objects-imprints of industrial matrix. And it is because of this characteristic, both oneiric and sinister, that the violent materiality and 'indirect monumentality' of which they are bearers, through an unprecedented declination of the relationship between myth and image, identifies thesemastodontic monolithic sarcophagi as the ruins of a post-apocalyptic modernity, increasingly distanced in an aesthetic dimension that tends dangerously to dissolve them from their historical context, thus transforming them into gigantic cabinets des mirages endowed with their own disturbing autonomy.