Vesper is a multidisciplinary biannual scientific journal published by the Department of Architecture and Arts at the L'Università Iuav di Venezia. It looks at the relationships between forms and processes of thought and of design and although it's fair to call this an academic examination of the arcane, it's also a project that will attract anyone with a curious mind.
Vesper hosts a wide spectrum of narratives, writing and stylistic differences, ‘privileging the visual intelligence of design, of graphic expression, of images and contaminations between different languages.’ The journal is conceived as a series of thematic issues, each one divided into sections to offer diverse perspectives and to search out reverberations between ideas and reality change, connections between tangible facts and their potentials, transformative prospects and collective perception.
The tenth issue of Vesper is dedicated to the Eden Project, exploring the ‘essence’ of pursued destinies, the tangible ‘collapse’ of imagined goals and the tools employed in the realms of work, life, and thought to achieve them. Karl Kraus once argued: ‘Origin is the goal’. If Eden represents the origin, as such it is eternally lost and only attainable as a goal. In his theses On the Concept of History, Walter Benjamin referred to ‘progress’ as the project of modernity that compels us to establish Eden as a goal, but it is our fixation on this goal that perpetually distances us from the origin, leaving us trapped in the melancholic state of lost paradise.
