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R.M. Villa:
"Europe as a Project";
Talk: Re-Imagining Europe, Royal Netherlands Institute Rome (invited); 2019-09-17 - 2019-09-19.

Crisis seems to be one of the most overarching figures of the contemporary condition, at least since the Great Depression. Both Europe and architecture share such a condition; their `crisis´ appears to foreground a perpetually imminent end. Yet what if crisis-as a krinein, a cutting, a division, that here never seems to set-is not conceived in historical terms as an échec, but rather in `architectonic´ terms, as an immanent structure? Can we think about Europe through architecture (and the other way around) in a way that suspends any historical linearity in relation to them? To conceive of Europe as a project means then to `embrace´ this crisis as an `obstacle´ and turn it into the very productive core of the European `edifice´. Its cutting, uprooting power and at the same time its ability to cast out of such uprootedness new `virtuous grounds´ might perhaps shed a light on the `edification´ of Europe and on its future possibilities, not only in spite, but precisely in virtue of what could be considered its `constitutive weakness´.

Crisis seems to be one of the most overarching figures of the contemporary condition, at least since the Great Depression. Both Europe and architecture share such a condition; their `crisis´ appears to foreground a perpetually imminent end. Yet what if crisis-as a krinein, a cutting, a division, that here never seems to set-is not conceived in historical terms as an échec, but rather in `architectonic´ terms, as an immanent structure? Can we think about Europe through architecture (and the other way around) in a way that suspends any historical linearity in relation to them? To conceive of Europe as a project means then to `embrace´ this crisis as an `obstacle´ and turn it into the very productive core of the European `edifice´. Its cutting, uprooting power and at the same time its ability to cast out of such uprootedness new `virtuous grounds´ might perhaps shed a light on the `edification´ of Europe and on its future possibilities, not only in spite, but precisely in virtue of what could be considered its `constitutive weakness´.

Europe, Crisis