The swinging cities of the eternal present

Abstract

How many furnitures, or houses, or urban districts, that where designed and made in the 80s are still relevant today? What clothes or shoes that period can be worn without appearing old or out of time? Everybody can say almost all. In forty years the living spaces have not changed that much. Even less their projects have been modified. The way in which they are conceived and designed is almost the same. Fashion, architecture, and cities are the sensitive forms that better represent the people that generated them. They express lifestyle, a status and, in some way aspirations and expectations for the future. Is it possible that they remained so indifferent to the changes of the last decades? A few times the distance between gestalt and zeitgeist was so dramatic. The paradigm that binds the aesthetics to the projection of time blowed up. The overcoming of modernity lies especially in this. We live like an eternal present. Where the sensitive forms and their representations in solid space no longer carry an idea of the future. They always seem to be more or less the same, immutable and increasingly deprived of sense in the rush of the sharing information technologies revolution that is distorting the system of social relations and the way in which things and places are related each other. Even today everything changes and so much faster than before. Innovation is conducted in the intangible areas of the net rather than in the material spaces. We live with our head in the Cloud. Objects are intended to produce informations that are monitored and transmitted in real time. Everything is accessible and traceable. The control is based on knowledge. In the era of the Internet of Everything, everything is destined to become another (as Marco Valsecchi wrote in February 2016 in the Sole 24 Ore Dossier on Technological Innovation). How the forms of living are changing, or will change? The architecture of the eternal present, paraphrasing Giedion (The Eternal Present, the beginnings of architecture. Pantheon Books, New York, 1964), is still able to propose innovation trough projects? The simultaneous action of three key factors: the economic crisis, the environmental one and the sharing information technologies revolution is so deeply changing our lifestyles and the way we imagine and we want the solid forms of our future that all our design knowledge suddenly seems inadequate both as an interpretative tool of the current condition and as a device capable of generating new environmental, social, economic performances and new beauty. Nothing surprising. In the history of architecture and the city the great technological changes have produced major changes in the lifestyles, in the forms of living and consequently in the way in which we design them. If the major paradigm of modernity was about the best possible spatial synthesis between function and architecture. Today, with the information technologies revolution, we have the opposite problem. To give meaning, narrative and uses-even temporary uses- to spaces that have already given forms and turn them into attractive and ecologically efficient places to live.