Architecture can approach contemporary reality from a critical, ecological and collective perspective, beyond formal design. In his research, Carlo proposes the concept of the “device of the real” as a tool to recognize and act upon the tangible world territory, objects, communities and the “collective device” as its shared development, in which architectural learning and practice are opened to collaboration and collective experience.

The author constructs a research project in eleven episodes or “devices,” ranging from everyday objects to urban and rural contexts. Each one functions as a fragment of the world that, when observed or intervened upon, reveals a network of ecological, social and political relationships. Through them, Carlo articulates a multiscalar reflection spanning three cities: Madrid, Berlin and Barcelona, with a rural territory in Cantabria, attempting to conceive architecture as mediation between the local and the global. Cities appear as environments in crisis and transformation, where modernity has left behind a fragmented geography of vacant lots, edges and inhabited ruins.

Madrid forms the conceptual core of the research. A Mahou beer can found in the Ensanche de Vallecas and the Cerro Almodóvar become places that condense the tensions between nature and urbanization, between memory and progress, that characterize the current Madrid landscape. The Mahou can, a trivial object, becomes a symbol of the culture of waste and of the failure of the modern project of total order. It represents the materialization of excess and abandonment left behind by recent urban expansion. The work introduces a reflection on the possibility of reading the city through its remnants, understanding the landscape not as a final product but as an unfinished process.

Cerro Almodóvar, in turn, appears as a place loaded with history and artistic meaning. Its position on the boundary between the built city and the plateau made it the setting for the pictorial explorations of the Escuela de Vallecas between 1920 and 1930. The hill becomes a device that allows one to think about the relationship between art, territory and modernity. It is a place from which to observe the city at a distance, as if it were a frontier between the natural and the urban. Carlo describes it as a “viewpoint of the real,” a point suspended between collective memory and contemporary speculation.

The landscape is presented as a cartography of discontinuities, vacant lots, abandoned infrastructures, interstitial spaces where it is still possible to experience the city through collective action. These margins are considered by the work as fertile grounds for rethinking architecture as a critical practice.

Udina proposes a softened and slowed gaze in contrast to the logic of incessant growth, capable of recognizing the value of what already exists, even of what is residual. Landscapes are interpreted as laboratories in which new forms of inhabiting could be tested, based on reuse, cooperation and care.

Landscapes like Madrid appear as spaces for questioning modernity and proposing new ecological and collective narratives.