Designing Asylum Space? Political Asylum Architecture, an incomplete understanding.

This thesis investigates the spaces of political asylum across past and present, with the intention of provoking new definitions of its spatial manifestation. It begins by reconstructing an archaeology of asylum, tracing its forms from antiquity to the late 20th century. This is not a linear history but an exploration of the conditions that allowed asylum to appear, and reappear, as a spatial practice. Alongside this historical narrative, the concept of the signature is introduced as a way to follow recurring patterns and logics across time and space, patterns that reveal asylum’s presence even beyond the dominant Western narratives shaping the research. The analysis then moves to contemporary Italy, where the reception system, known and referred to as accoglienza, and its legislative definitions become the central focus. Here, law is understood not merely as text but as a morphological force that shapes asylum space through acts of stretching, replacing, splitting, warping, and extending. These operations are not treated as abstract legal concepts but are anchored in concrete and material examples, centers, and territories spread across the Italian landscape. The aim is not only to understand how law has spoken of asylum, but to show how it has built and transformed its spaces. Moving beyond analysis, the thesis concludes with a series of situated reflections on design in the context of asylum, ending in a deliberately incomplete decalog. These are not guidelines or proposals but fragments, attempts to hold together the many threads woven throughout the work, all leading back to one simple, urgent question: what, in the end, makes asylum space?