“The human brain is the most complicated organization of matter that we know. If this then is suffering from any mental disease it becomes a universe by itself.” - Isaac Asimov 

For this project, architecture aims to erode the stigmatic boundaries that surround the existing site of the Mental Hospital di Quarto, with the city of Genova. To achieve this, borrowing from Asomov’s notion of the complex mind I conceived the project as a set of mechanical components, instrumental in altering and defining how the space is inhabited. 

This composition, then, becomes a metaphor for what it is to live inside a work that, in the same way, a dysfunctional brain works, follows its own rules. 

Here architecture wants to trigger the agent of discovery towards its users, it wants to be explored to then be analyzed and understood. 

Users have to play and experiment with it. Playing in this case becomes a form of language rather than “something fun” it exists with your primordial human nature. 

By playing, this series of artifacts come together in the asylum, Lending the beauty of a “dysfunctional” machine. 

A project by —> Caterina Miralles

Supervised by —> Intermediate2 Unit Architectural Association

Year —> 2017

Press —> RIBA President’s Medal