Pasubio
Friedensschauplatz ― Theater of Peace

Daniel Gethmann/Waltraud P. Indrist (eds.)
Graz: Publishing Company of Graz University of Technology, January 2022
German/English, 120 pages, paperback
ISBN 978-3-85125-865-3
EUR 35,00

The architectural project „Pasubio: Theater of Peace“ starts from a thorough study of the war landscape in the Pasubio mountains. Rather than performing an intervention in the landscape, it provides its spatial antithesis: a theatre of peace, that understands itself as a political form of architecture. In this sense, architectural design is a critical instrument; it is capable of examining a concrete theatre of war, i.e. the battle between Austria-Hungary and Italy during World War I at the Pasubio mountains, of understanding the site as a coherent memorial, and finally, of establishing a spatial opposition through „boundary objects“, that replace a singular intervention with one that is collective. In this regard the designs are qualified for radically transforming the Pasubio wartime landscape. Through the elemental accessibility of their mode of presentation, the architectural designs go far beyond their primary status and present a complex of spatial objects that invite to mark a blind spot in the documentation of the military confrontations between Italy and Austria-Hungary in the mountain warfare of World War I and to use this blind spot for the establishment of shared spaces of peace.