Tra Utopia e Adattamento: il Progetto di Architettura nelle Transizioni

This paper investigates the dialectical relationship between project and utopia as a projective logic grounded in a tension toward a spatial and temporal “elsewhere,” interpreting contradiction as an intrinsic creative principle of architecture. Drawing on Manfredo Tafuri’s critical framework, architecture is understood as a non-linear and conflict-driven process, in which metamorphosis emerges as an open condition shaped by morphogenetic principles that define its constraints, trajectories, and modes of evolution. In the contemporary context of climate and ecological crisis, this framework demands a radical reconfiguration of design practices, oriented toward sustainability, resilience, and adaptability. Through an examination of Lara-Vinca Masini’s contribution to the 1978 Venice Biennale, the paper revisits topology and morphogenesis as critical concepts for exploring alternative mental territories and emergent forms beyond disciplinary boundaries. Reinterpreting utopia as a conceptual and ethical space enables a reconsideration of design constraints, positioning limits as generative principles and shifting architectural ambition from spatial expansion to the transformation of existing conditions. The legacy of late twentieth-century utopian and counter-utopian projects is thus reframed as a foundation for an “architecture of transitions,” capable of operating within unstable and finite environments through ecological and systemic approaches. The paper concludes by presenting the research conducted by the NatureCityLAB research unit on urban interstitial spaces and climate-adaptive streetscapes, highlighting architecture’s role as a mediator between ecological dynamics and social demands, and as an agent of evolutionary transformation driven by incremental, locally grounded interventions with global implications.