If war has always challenged architecture, threatening its permanence and layering its memory, it composes, at the same time, an important part of the design tradition (B. Cache, 2007). The paper investigates how architecture has tried to overcome this implied ambiguity through a reinterpretation of its own language, in the attempt to inhabit the transitory spaces and extreme conditions produced by the conflict.
By comparing two extremely different case studies, the Nevada National Security Site and the villages established by the Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, the paper underlines how war destructive and fascinating power has been reinterpreted, in the first case in order to attract tourists (A.Santarossa, 2012) or exploited, in the second example, as the pretext to invent an ideal future (N.Srnicek, A.Williams, 2018), within a progressive process of mixing entertainment space and conflict dystopian settings.
