2007
Andreas Faoro, Francesca Rizzetto, Antonio Rizzo

Greek civilization had as its cradle the physical structure of a constellation made of different islands -an archipelago. Its common identity of power and culture was nurtured by links to different colonies; its civic political organization was based on individual potential set in a common horizon. Though restricted to a limited group of men with power, such politics, had a collective process of decision-making that was strictly based on individual expression. Every Greek city spatially represented the socio-political system as a grouped pattern of distinct parts: the public spaces of the Agora, the theatre and temples, as opposed to the private oikoi (houses).
The Agora was the space for social confrontation and discussion, the theatre and temples for common imagination. We declare this pattern to be the basis of the European city. The archipelago is a mythical figure for its immediate legibility while being made of parts: the island-parts concentrate and appoint each their own specific place, while at the same time, by virtue of proximity, they establish the veritable sea -Archi-Pelagos -of which they all are part. The archipelago represents a multiplicity in which the manifold (or multiplicity itself) is not dispersed, but presented in its conceptual essence as an absolute entity among parts, by comparison, juxtaposition and counter-position.(…)The sedes is no absolute affirmation of a centre or the emergence of a unique reference point, but we may say that "In the mobile and changing space of coordination and co-habitation, which is also the sense oipolemos (struggle), the singularities of the archipelago belong to one another. Since the centre is truly nothing except an impetus that obliges each part to transcend itself, not one part possesses its own centre; all parts navigate towards the others, and all of them towards the absent fatherland." (Massimo Cacciari, 1997)

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