To build implies the occultation of something. Traditionally something must be “buried” inside the building. Obviously to build also means to make something evident, available to inspection; but that which is inevitably occulted was already waiting there. Where and what are we trying to hide?
I am stydying two cases of occultation: the Fabbriceria and the BIM.
The Fabbriceria is a “room” with a very ancient tradition and still operative today in the form of the builder’s office on the construction site: a place where you can keep everything that is relevant for the construction while the construction is ongoing. No matter how carefully you intend to preserve that something the risk it runs is always that of vanishing. The risk it runs motivates it. So there is a hidden anxiety in the building and the construction of something and this hidden anxiety must be occulted. Archaically in order to keep this hidden anxiety occulted the architect had to be killed at the end. All the documents that might survive after the death of the architect are the proofs of the architect’s culpability. The forgiveness after building is postponed into infinity. The end is ideally postponed indefinitely like in The Thousand and One Night. I will present two cases of Fabbriceria. One is the historical Fabbriceria of San Petronio in Bologna. The other is a case of a humble barrack on a construction site.
The BIM is now one of the most top-rated digital “tools”. I am interested in its capacity to store a potentially infinite amount of data – “big data” – concerning the building. This is a very interesting way to occult: by applying sensors and digital surveying systems to anything, you can know anything in “real time” and store anything concerning anything in a mass of data that is bigger than the real (mise en abyme). Being always more than anything you might be interested to know about anything, the BIM is the fulfillment of the project of the proportion between the microcosm and macrocosm. Like exposing his own beating heart to the dying victim of a sacrifice the BIM disorients whoever wants to know.
I will develop my research on two cases of BIM’s application: one concerning a public building and the other relating to a project of “diffused” BIM - Building Identification (Identity Card), as suggested nowadays (in Europe), for everybody who wants to know the documents and all the information that are relevant for the building they buy, or live in.
That which is occulted inside or outside the building – more or less carefully preserved or contained, often inexorably dispersed, available on condition or hidden behind an inscrutable storage of big data – is its representation and its honesty depends on our willingness to know without being obsessed by the insistence to deceit.
Each house has its black box (flight recorder).