Il nuovo nell’antico: The New in the Ancien

In Italy, every square meter of land we excavate holds the remains of the body and acts of a man who lived in previous centuries. That land is, therefore, sacred. What authorizes us to forget this? It is from this consideration, deeply inherent to the Italian condition and generally extendable to the broader Western European context, that my work as an architect finds its rationale.The aesthetic and ethical drift of our time, which does not spare architecture, originates from a dissolute and instrumental interpretation of modernity, from a false adherence to environmental themes, from an improper reliance on technological tools, and above all, from an uncritical subjugation to the demands of the market economy. This overarching superficiality, which has overwhelmed Western society in recent decades, as well as rapidly expanding and unprepared societies and disarmed developing societies, has deprived architecture of any disciplinary autonomy, contributing to the desolate destruction of the landscape that stands before our eyes.These expressions do not give rise to any condition of modernity, but rather to pretentious declarations of “belonging to one’s time,” a time that in fact represents the worst aspect of itself and its civil and moral inconsistency. On the contrary, the recognition of a topography that, starting from the Roman era, belongs to a history so often fractured yet subsequently accumulated in a complex and accessible stratigraphy, is the potential ground on which the measures of our modernity can be grafted. For me, this value of transmission constitutes the very meaning of architecture.It is evident how, since the centuries after the Year 1000, the revolution of modernity following the fearful crisis that succeeded the orderly, global, and totalizing clockwork of Roman organization coincided with the suppression of limits as an unbreachable system, previously characterized by a grandeur in closed forms.