The "Allegorical Facade”: Between Temporary Set-Up and Collective Well-Being During Health Emergency

ABSTRACT

Starting in early 2020, with the spread of the Covid 19 virus, the home environment has been designated an elective shelter, marking the boundary against potentially threatening outdoor space. Life inside the domestic enclosure, necessary to prevent the risk of contagion and to protect everyone's health, inevitably coincided with the exclusion from participation in a series of public meeting occasions, clearly affecting daily life and also urging the world of art, design and architecture to offer solutions aimed at encouraging adaptation to the emergency situation. Into this scenario comes the experience of The House Floats, in Louisiana. In February 2020, celebrations for Mardi Gras, the New Orleans carnival, contributed to the accelerated spread of coronavirus disease. Faced with the prescription to stop the 2021 carnival festivities, the answer comes in the initiative of a series of artists and designers the facades of entire neighborhoods where the traditional parade takes place are temporarily transformed into staged masks inspired by floats. The occasion of interaction between the facade and the "mask” takes the form of the insertion of installations, with results that from time to time deny or amplify the compositional characteristics of the facade. In any case, the dynamic character of the parades of allegorical floats is replaced by the fixity of a prepared representation. Starting from the analysis of the above-mentioned case study, the paper proposes a new interpretation focused on the topic of the "allegorical facade”, interpreted as a design strategy capable of educating to social respect and to the community well-being. Through the methods of architectural survey and drawing, this paper focuses on the analysis of the relationship between the refuge and the sign, attributing to the latter a clear value in the processes of reconstruction of the city, both from a physical and an identity point of view. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.