This dissertation, by conceptualising liminal architecture, explores the relationships and tensions between the term limes, understood as moving border, and the term limen, understood as a threshold.
The inquiry focusses on the territory of Gorizia and Nova Gorica, highlighting one of its idiosyncratic features. Its geographical position and characteristics made this area peripheral to different centres of power, which, time and again, extended here their influence. Architecture – usually thought of as solid and permanent – had therefore to negotiate with the counterintuitive impermanence of its soil status, shifting from one nation to another, from one cultural and legal framework to another. The condition of a moving border – shifting in short time intervals, producing discontinuities, ruptures and suspensions from territorial status to a new one – deeply affected this place and the way architects dealt with its transformation, proposing a challenging limit condition.
The research hypothesis assumes that this specific moving border may be a laboratory to investigate architecture’s fundamental affairs, boundaries and their representation, questioning architecture’s role in spatial analysis as well as exploring architecture’s potential and possible design strategies that may mediate, challenge and contest the representation of boundaries or may produce and trigger alternative design imaginaries and perceptions.
