Designing Asylum Space? Political Asylum Architecture, an incomplete understanding.

The thesis begins by tracing how asylum emerged and re-emerged from antiquity to the end of the XX century, not as a linear history but as a series of conditions that allowed the spatialization of its practice. The focus then shifts to contemporary Italy, where asylum emerges through law and decrees. Laws are taken and analysed semantically, with the textual operations transformed into spatial ones, allowing the evolution of reception infrastructure to emerge. The work concludes with a set of reflections on design, offering open-ended fragments that return to a central question: what makes asylum space?

Author
Rossella Altobelli

Supervisor
Camillo Boano

Master's degree
Architecture for Sustainability