Modern civilization, argues Franco "Bifo" Berardi, can be understood as a colonization of reality through laws. This included not only law in the strict sense—whose statutes sought to define a norm to regulate and 'normalize' social activity—but also the scientific laws that, for this Italian philosopher, aimed to "reduce the becoming of physical matter to the repetition of a model" (Berardi, 2018:40), thereby overcoming natural chaos through reason and measure (which share the Latin root ratio).
Understanding this diversity of critiques regarding the norm can be useful for identifying the attitudes contemporary architecture adopts when confronting laws. On one hand, in opposition to the spectacle-architecture characteristic of neoliberalism, a rigorously contained architecture emerges, finding in the laws of geometry and composition an aesthetic key that allows it to reclaim a certain territory of certainty. Another current attempts to explore, within legal loopholes, opportunities for an architecture that transcends the empire of externally imposed norms and standards. At the same time, and in a more cultural than practical vein, cutting-edge research into architectural history has focused on revealing the interests and contradictions implicit in the laws to which it has been subjected.
For if the law is the framework that enables civilized and egalitarian coexistence (in theory, we should all be equal before the law), the constitution is the architecture in which that equality resides. Such architecture can be restrictive or liberating; rigid or flexible; it can promote community or individuality; it can be supportive or subsidiary; authoritarian or civilizing. The precise proportion of all these characteristics determines the qualities of social life and the development possibilities for a country's inhabitants. By defining possibilities and impossibilities, and serving as the law that governs all other laws and institutional agreements in a country, the constitution is the space in which society can move.
