Abstract
If, as we have tried to show, humanist architecture is defined less by its relationship with antiquity than by its relationship with rhetoric, then we must try to define the architectural eloquence of places of power. This involves an anthropology of living in which arrangements and incorporations respond, or not, to an architectural gesture. Here, we focus on a fundamental gesture, undoubtedly the most common in any relationship of power : that of distancing oneself and finding the right measure of separation between bodies. Digging the gap means bringing into play a grammar of distance and distrust, but who's afraid of whom ? At the table of power, during banquets and rituals of diplomatic intimidation, everything is decidedly a matter of spacing and interval. From Milan to Moscow, following in the footsteps of the architect Aristotele Fioravanti da Bologna who, among other Italian architects, set out in the last third of the Quattrocento to build the Kremlin, we seek to define the way in which distance protects, interval exposes and emptiness centralizes.
