Forms of the Void: Gorizia and the Border that No Longer Exists

Abstract

For almost 60 years, the city of Gorizia has been divided by the state border separating Italy and Slovenia, where on the other side, the twin city of Nova Gorica has developed. In the past, these two urban realities have not been communicating on the urban and architectonic levels, negating each other’s existence, but are now a continuous entity and must find new ways to grow and develop together, even if they belong to two different nations. The University of Trieste, along with the Comune di Gorizia (Gorizia municipality), has developed a laboratory called the RRR lab, with the objective to redevelop and regenerate those urban spaces and buildings that have been put back in play after the fall of the border and the new urban geography that it has created. It is a landscape made up of areas and structures without use or significance, generated by the Dadaist collage of the two cities, that together were, at the time of the laboratory, candidates for the 2025 European Capital of Culture. Starting from this specific case, a more general theme of the research deals with the void. This aspect is easily recognizable in its architecture, where for the purpose of the quality of the work, the single parts that make up a building are not as important as the spaces that are indirectly determined by them. The void, then, can assume an architectonic quality and become the element on which to base the opening principle, “where there is nothing, everything is possible”.