Overwrite the real: grafting architectural “viruses” for metamorphic architectures

The system of thought, inherited from the last century, is based on simplifying and reductive principles which are no longer able to relate to an increasingly complex reality. Today we are witnessing an epochal change in our reality in which knowledge is no longer based on an objectual system, but on a more inclusive relational network. In the digital relational network, we can rewrite a constant present according to a temporality that is no longer in function of the storage history, but the temporality that we decide to introduce. We can also overwrite an external drive, cloud space, or hard drive, leaving traces of what existed in the past. These changes can also be transferred to studies about the city and its architecture, through a circular system that no longer replaces the physical layers of the past, as happened in the last century, but overwrites the already written, in analogy to the digital system, trying to activate a complex vision that tries to ‘intertwine’, ‘hold together’ and ‘relate’ the different elements that make up a whole. To operate with a syntagmatic overwriting of the existing means to work with the concept of tradere (‘to transmit, to emphasize) and it authorizes to activate a system that creates architectures of relationships rather than objects, dynamic relational spaces instead of static spaces, interlacements capable of incorporating the different layers sedimented as a trigger to introduce new ones, integrating them to the existing ones. A system that hybridizes the past in the present, and makes itself a language, a new temporary code, made of adaptive tools conforming to the contemporary complexity.