THE HERMIT - In search of new utopias
Author
Dejvi DAUTI, Arjola SAVA
Affiliation
PhD IDAUP / Polis University, Tirana, Albania
Abstract
The architect is a sailor on a drifting boat, searching for the missing architectural form, a fragmentary manifesto that is placed before him at the beginning of his research. Sailing, alone like a hermit, he continually searches for a white whale, drawing fictitious shapes on long white sheets, as if to imitate the object of desire, trying to imagine and recreate his shapes sometimes in an obsessed way. On the bow of the boat, the scholar refines his vision day after day. He leans out over an empty ocean, every silence and ever denser color, in search of a new horizon, a limit to overcome. The Omeric journey that the architect undertakes, along the lines of that conducted by Ulysses in the Odyssey, in search of the perfect form, is described through blocks of notes and hidden images of mental maps to navigate the north of the tables. In both stories, we search for a home or a version of it that we keep in our memory, moving from a physical to an imaginary conception of it. Thresholds, borders, and states are crossed to recreate or imagine the possible transformations that occurred in the place of origin. Ulysses finds Ithaca different; the architect imagines the changes that can happen in a place. The mental image and theories that we can find in our drawings during a journey are an undisputed source for the imagination, creating possibilities through the hybridization of what we observe and what we know. The Pustec region gives us the challenge of imagining a utopian reality and the possibility of a new way of colonizing new territories.
Keywords
Memory, Palimpsest, Architecture, Landscape.
