Space as storyteller: Benjamin, Marinetti, Calvino and Perec (Walter Benjamin, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, France, Italy)

The dissertation is a study of new and critical notions of space that develop in the 20th Century. The dissertation is comparative in its modality because it aims to show moments of intersection and exchanges of critical theory, literature, architecture and theater. The point of departure is the notion of "space as storyteller" that is derived from a reading of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project. A selective reading of the Arcades Project aims to highlight Benjamin's interpretation of modernity that is determined by a spatiality that plays as a differential among space, place and room. From Benjamin's text is developed a theatrical and allegorical dimension of modernity that exists as a mobile place of experiment, in which are interwoven theoretical, literary and urban constructions and urban experiences. Some of the results that are obtained from Benjamin's interpretation of modernity are then compared to the spatial theatricality of Futurist experimentations, which attempt with abstraction to bring to the stage prefigurations of the urban experience and of future constructed landscapes. It is shown how in theater Futurism achieves a virtual synthesis of the tensions produced by the sudden changes inherent in modernity. This study of the space of modernity as elaborated in the first half of the 20th Century is followed by a reconsideration of the themes of the spatial experience and critical reflection. There are two main directions that orient the research: one is a reading of the extreme complication of exterior and interior spaces, as they are elaborated in literature by Italo Calvino and Georges Perec. The texts by these two authors are considered in their singularity as fictions that depict in their storytelling the tensions and the emotions to which the modern subject is exposed. The other direction looks at how neo-avant-garde groups have elaborated, in graphical and architectural terms, imaginary cityscapes that become exemplary moments of interrogation as well of experimentation of the practice of architecture in the second half of the 20th Century.