A Mosaic of Fragility: Interdisciplinary Ties between Morales’s Weak Architecture, Tarkovsky’s Weak Man and Vattimo’s Weak Thought

Abstract

ABSTRACT Fragility allows a deep development and understanding of the tie between the self and the outer surrounding. It softens the friction on the threshold between the known and the unknown. The paper elaborates three manifestations of fragility: Tarkovsky’s weak man [sic] presents meekness as a silent receptivity of the world; Vattimo’s weak thought demands a desire to search for the farthest Other – through sacrifice and kenosis; Sola-Morales’ weak architecture celebrates the undefined terrain vague and the rediscovery of ruins as layered trails of transience. A comparative understanding of the three manifestations brings an alternative reading of architectural history as a multiplicity of many realities that a single history masks, addresses, and reinforces. Here, the historian is an archaeologist, re-creating a mosaic of space-time: continuously operating between the bare evidence and its meaningful contemporary translation into a historical narrative.