Design and therapeutic freedom. The Parco Basaglia in Gorizia

Abstract

The Parco Basaglia, the ex psychiatric hospital in Gorizia, is an emblematic site of the civic and medical revolution started in 1961 by Franco Basaglia, at his first appointment as director. In the last few years the Park has been the subject of study and design at the BA Course in Architecture at the University of Trieste. One can design, inside and outside the University, if one believes to treat the space in abstract or quantitative terms, or if one starts with the analysis of the material and immaterial traces present on a site in order to imagine its possible and necessary future. Given its history, the ex psychiatric hospital in Gorizia is not only a site in which one can exercise the different forms of a project, but it is also a cultural resource of critical thinking that can afford the School of Architecture with the opportunity to question some crucial issues: in a phase of post-critical architecture, how can one give form, represent and perhaps even learn from a battle of the critical thinking borne out of the psychiatry, but that warns against all the normalizing powers, the objectivity of subjectivity and the reduction of the un-problematic un-certainty? The proximity of the park to the former Italian-Yugoslavian border, which was part of the iron curtain and nowadays is the more peaceful Italian-Slovenian border, the early twenty-century structure of the park, and the historic events that took place there, bring out central issues that one has to bear in mind for the project: the identity, the architecture and the inhabitants; the limit, in its material and immaterial meaning; the memory, the material consistence of the existing architecture and the civic, social and ethical battle for the freedom and the searching for oneself, even though in a problematic way. This is the only way to search truly, even in architecture.