World & Ideas

The travel room. An idle provocation, an easy oxymoron? How is it possible to combine two concepts so far from each other: the experience of a quiet, circumscribed place, and the most emblematic expression of escape, of tension towards elsewhere, of boundlessness? In a landscape where there is nothing to discover any longer, where no alternative is assured any longer, does it still esist the utopian possibility of of an "elsewhere"? When we talk about the concept of travel, we commonly mean the identification of a temporal interval included between two defined instants of the existential continuum. But, as soon as we shift our attention on its more real, personal dimension, the interior one, we realize how the interval limits tend to expand progressively. The travel, then, becomes a permanent dimension of being in the world, an open path to manifoldness that ends by putting aside the specific occasion that brought it about. In this sense, travelling means taking steps into the space of subjectivity, just as children do, it means driving thoughts towards the possible, it means planning meaning.

Bis ans Ende der Welt Wim Wenders A person is constantly changing... The only thing that does not change is stupidity. Igor Stravinsky ... passa l'infinito di quì. Lucio Fontana

by Valter VERONI MILAN POLYTECHNIC, Italy Faculty of Architecture School of Industrial Design Laboratorio of Industrial Design and Environmental Design I Academic Year 1997/98