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Personal project
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Archiatric – Federico Babina – 2016
Archiatric – Federico Babina – 2016
Regarding the “Archiatric” project what can you tell us?
In this series the image of the house is a metaphor of the mind with various messages. The first is about the relationship between creativity and psychopathology; I feel everyone has psychic discomfort, even in small quantities and some people are capable to control it better than others and this is when it turns into an illness. I read some time ago that Aristotle used to associate melancholy to the genius; during his time, melancholy was considered a mental illness, same as depression nowadays; so the relationship between problems and creativity of highly sensitive people was a topic I wanted to address. The other topic dear to me was the public stigma for people with mental illnesses; I wanted to discuss this matter to further highlight the condition, even if I ended up putting very different issues on the same level, like talking about dyslexia rather than depression or schizophrenia. Obviously I have only dealt with some of the illnesses but there are many more; my idea was not to contend this major issue in a single work. I did not want to talk about everything but just what I was feeling in that precise moment and although they may have not been the most important topics, it was utterly important to talk about such a delicate subject which will affect everyone in same shape or form sooner or later in life. This project was followed by many for its sensitive content and received mix feedback, both positive and negative. To represent each illness as if it were a small house means that the architecture itself and the living areas influence our behavior and psychophaty of those who design houses and those who live in them; it is very important where and how we live, but equally important is the way we design and build houses. In fact, we have many schizophrenic architects who turn the people who occupy the spaces they designed schizophrenics!
