FOREWORD

Modi Operandi 01 presents ‘Spaces, Poetics and Voids’, a project for a prison in London by Archiprix 2010 and Archiprix International 2011 award winning architect Simone Pizzagalli. In the book, Pizzagalli’s project is ‘framed’ by the contributions of scholars familiar with the topics raised. Nicolò Privileggio elaborates the relationship between architecture and language by emphasising the void as an appropriate design technique for an architectural construct. Privileggio argues that the analogy between architecture and language is not necessarily located in representation, which he considers more or less obsolete. Language can operate as a tool for architectural design and result in a personal, yet extremely relevant, architectural formal language grounded in relationships. Marc Schoonderbeek discusses overlapping themes that relate to the topics inherent in Pizzagalli’s project and those of the Border Conditions graduate studio at the Faculty of Architecture of Delft University of Technology, within which the project was developed. Rather than present an introduction to the project, Schoonderbeek has chosen to examine four of its themes: ‘city’, ‘poetics’, ‘prison’ and ‘body’. In doing so, he calls for a general reconsideration of the architectural project, by relating the radical differentiation at the basis of contemporary readings of the city to the human body, for which architecture intends to provide space.

Delft, May 2012
Marc Schoonderbeek
Modi Operandi 01 Editor