Original scientific paper

Architecture as a Sign of Rites of Passage: Fortification Systems as a Psalympsest with Signs of Socio-Political Change Inscribed in the Topography of Europe

Antonio Grgić ; independent architect and freelance artist

Abstract

This paper focuses on the bunker systems inscribed in the topography of the European continent as a sort of signs indicating rites of passage from one geopolitical and socio-political state into another. They symbolize the war trauma in a way, like signs that remain incised in one’s skin after the rites of passage practiced by the “primitive peoples”. In reference to the hypothesis of social psychologist Richard Koenigsbergad that the individual tends to identify himself with the formation of the national ego, and that of Sigmund Freud, for whom the Ego is always related to the surface of the skin, architecture is seen as a product of marking the skin in rites of passage. Today, when migrants pass by the bunkers from World War II at the Croatian-Hungarian border in order to squeeze themselves through the newly erected fence with steel blades, a new scar emerges on the skin of Europe, shaping its new identity, and the society as a whole participates in this rite of passage from the old state into a new one, still unforeseeable.

Keywords

refuge crisis; bunkers; tatoo; rites of passage; architecture; psychoanalysis; social psychology

Hrčak ID:

194681

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/194681

Publication date:

1.12.2017.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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