Architetture del corpo urbano. Perché la città di oggi non è rappresentativa

This article focuses on the contemporary relationship between architecture and the city from a non - representational approach. This interpretation is put forward addressing the impossibility of contemporary architecture to merely construct the locus for the evocation or re-emergence of collectives and shared social values. The term performance is yet introduced in order to address the more relevant capacity of architecture as delinked from its mimetic function and visuality, and rather considered as a complex interplay of relations: a situated, effective practice intentionally oriented to modify the urban landscape in which it is conceived and the social values that it permeates. To focus this shift, the article roots the terms of debate as initially assessed in the seminal essay of Archizoom Associati accompanying the presentation of "No-Stop city". That meta-project, stating that the city was “ no more a place but a condition”, clearly referred to a politic horizon where the entire urban realm was collapsed in a new never ending neutral surface, absorbing consumption, living and production in a sole urban mode.Within this frame, the article thus attempts to identify certain forms of contemporary architecture, that aspire to re-establish the sense of the city as the site of a political transformation of places, morphologies and habits, whose concern is an effective contribution to urban culture at large.