Curated by Andrea Zamboni and Massimo Curzi (Centro Studi Domus)

Editoriale Domus, 2013

With texts by: Andrea Zamboni and Massimo Curzi (Centro Studi Domus), Andrea Cavani, Giulio Orsini, Mario Rigoni Stern

Projects by: Boltshauser Architekten, Adam Khan Architects, Bearth & Deplazes Architekten, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, Sol89

Photoghaps by Paola De Pietri

AZIONE IN DIFESA DELLA NATURA

Andrea Zamboni (Centro Studi Domus)

Nature is not always capable of healing itself like it did when it erased the scars left by World War I, as documented in the photograph series To Face by Paola De Pietri. Almost always, the opposite is true. The repeated instances of more harmful and atrocious consumption of land (not due to such destructive and catastrophic events as war, floods or earthquakes, but the result of obtuse action in the present) are leading to the permanent loss of natural, human and material resources in the here and now. The obsession with acting under conditions of emergency, as seen in the recent seismic events in Abruzzo and Emilia, tends to lead to approximation and short-sightedness by being solely an ancestral thrust of immediate necessity. This leads to much worse catastrophes than those that we should have to deal with, leaving a trail of scars that are much more difficult to heal. The chemotherapy customarily adopted in certain cases is far more devastating than the cancer that it is meant to cure. We espouse the line of thought followed by Joseph Beuys in his Difesa della Natura (Defence of Nature) operation, namely that the principle of compensation, combined with the awareness of a sense of limit, may consciously affect the present and guide the actions and thoughts that good architecture ought to pursue on a daily basis. The ensuing point of view has nothing to do with categorical thinking or seeing sustainability as a hat to be worn, or a presumptive outlook laden with prejudices and short of breath.