Contributions   Conference session 1   Conference session 2   Conference session 3   Abstracts' submission Architecture, culture and identity: disturbed foundations and haunted habitats Chairman: Iain Chambers Iain Chambers is Professor in History of English Culture at the Istituto Universitario Orientale of Napoli. He is a pioneer of Cultural Studies in Italy. He is author of several books on post-modern and post-colonial thought, such as Migrancy, Identity, Culture (London & New York, 1994) and The Post-Colonial Question (London & New York, 1996).   The architect asan intellectual who participates in the construction of the cultural identity of his or her country, and hence occupies an analogous position to that of a writer, a poet, a musician, is simultaneously involved in a series of intercultural realities that exceed the political confines of that particular state. The central idea will be that of seeking to concentrate attention on the trans-national dimension of certain cultural practices and production that includes architecture in order to propose a sense of European identity elaborated on the basis of hybridity, contamination, and transit. With the presumed homogeneity of single national cultures in mind, the project intends to develop a European museum network that questions the idea of a collective "I", substituting it with a complicated and hybrid one, where each and every tradition becomes the site of translation. It is precisely through the realisation of a "museum" that the project intends to install such a critical cultural reading. Architecture as a specific historical discourse and practice will be set within a critical frame that interrogates its presumed autonomy and authority. For if to build is already to inhabit (Heidegger), architecture cannot shy away from a series of wider questions that invest the questions of appropriating space, installing a "ground" and inaugurating a sense of dwelling. If we cannot return to the tent, the cave and the leafy grove, we can nevertheless register the historical paths taken; these, as history, leave their disquieting footprints in the house of architecture, in the uneven and always incomplete sense of dwelling. Architecture as the material and technical appropriation of ground, history and memory proposes a problematic site of power and identity, of technics and politics, invariably secreted in the "neutral" grid lines of the "plan" and the project. If architecture provides us with a habitat, a home, it also contributes directly to the historical languages and cultural syntax in which "home", identity and domesticity, and the supposed opposites of the unhomily, the non-idential and the foreign, are conceived and received. Of course, as has frequently been observed from Simmel and Freud onwards, the home is invariably positioned in a two-way traffic: the door, the window, not only opens on the non-domestic scene, but are also the hinges and apertures whereby the outside, the external, the alien, enter and imbricate themselves in the domus. The inside is always haunted by what it seeks to exclude. "The recesses of the domestic space become sites for history's most intricate invasions. In that displacement, the borders between home and the world become confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other" (Bhabha).