12. Slits
Every shelter establishes a relationship with the outside.
Even when it protects, it does not entirely cut off contact with what surrounds it. It keeps an opening. A passage for light, for air, for the gaze.
In the erratic, this function is entrusted to the slits.
At first sight they look like simple incisions in the surface of the mass. Clean cuts that interrupt the continuity of the walls. Geometric signs within a form that recalls the randomness of stone.
Looked at more closely, however, they reveal a different nature. The slits do not only serve to connect inside and outside. They serve to construct a view. A slit does not show the landscape: it isolates a fragment of it and excludes everything else. Whoever looks does not choose what to see. That was chosen by whoever cut the opening.
And the cut is asymmetrical. The splay widens towards the inside: from within the field of vision is wide, from outside the opening is a crack. Whoever is inside sees a great deal and is seen very little.
Splayed slits originate in medieval fortifications, as narrow vertical openings designed for bows and crossbows; with the arrival of firearms they become gunports.
In that asymmetry lies the whole military reason of the slit. It serves to strike without being struck. The landscape, seen from there, is not a panorama: it is a field of fire.
In the erratic the device remains identical and the intention is removed. The same proportions, the same splay, the same selection of the gaze — and nothing to strike. Through the opening come the valley, the light, the sound of water.
It is neither a denunciation of military architecture nor a celebration of it. It is a borrowing. Alpine Switzerland is a territory that for a century looked at its own mountains through cracks: observation posts dug into the rock, camouflaged firing positions, forts guarding the passes, from Ticino to Graubünden. That way of looking exists, and it is available.
Remove the enemy, and a way of seeing remains. But to notice it, one has to go inside.
Translation: Archivio Umberto Cavenago
Splayed slit in a medieval fortification: narrow on the outside, wide on the inside.
The horizontal slit is an opening that is wider laterally, typical of later fortifications. It serves firearms, which above all require control of the horizontal field of fire. It marks a change in warfare: fewer arcing trajectories, more direct, frontal lines.
Light enters the slits and becomes an active part of the enclosed space. It does not simply illuminate the interior, it constructs it: it cuts across the surfaces, measures the thickness of the walls, makes the depth of the architecture visible.
Construction of a horizontal slit of Souvenir di montagna, 2026
The slits seen from inside Souvenir di montagna, 2023 (before the passivation of the Cor-Ten steel)
Fitting a slit of Souvenir di montagna, 2026, Pfister Metalbau workshop in Samedan