Rhetoric of Youth, or Bridges to Nowhere
Abstract
Architectonically speaking, there comes a stage in life that looks like a house. Everything appears already built up, all filled with kids and furniture, functionally disposed in interconnected spaces. The age of adulthood. Childhood instead is a playground, with apparatuses for swinging and climbing and an open court to serve their somewhat anarchic whims. What leads to the adult house is a road, which most people embark on in their twenties, as they decide what to do with their lives. But before one finds this road one needs to pass a bridge: the architectonics of youth, which, as I understand it in this paper, entails a passage between two distinct terrains, each more distinct than the passage between them: childhood and adulthood. Youth is not the road to the house of adulthood, which is discovered later; youth is a bridge, taking us to a place from which many roads start. Committing to an adult project means choosing one of them.
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