Fulvio Osti, A Manifesto

The Futurists’ Manifesto elevated “…courage, audacity, rebellion…” where “… A roaring automobile, that appears to run over a machine gun, is more beautiful than the victory in Samotrace.”
After a century of abuses, depredations, wanton waste, and risk-prone lives, the 21st Century now finds itself frail and exhausted, and Earth is now beginning to run out of breath.

Perhaps we should invent a new concept of courage, of audacity, and rebellion.  There’ll also be a need to reinvent a new concept of aesthetic  sensibility, where a space will return to having “Thoughtful immobility, extasy, and sleep” and the Victory of Samotrace will return to be a citizen of this world.

However, more than the Victory of Samotrace, which is fine where it is, what needs to be thought over again is the manner in which we move at all levels.  There’ll be a need to rediscover as an ethical choice, well before aesthetics, the lightness, the sedate, the sensible, the delivate, the elegant, the park, the sober, the parsimonious, the silent: in short, there will be a need to walk on tiptoes and to relearn how to raise as little dust as possible, to lower the tones and make less noise, also in the dynamics that are imposed by virtual communications, and very recent, unaccostumed mobility of human relations and the exchange of merchandise.

The earth’s crust has sustained too many injuries; territories have suffered too many wounds, to the environment, landscapes, and to cities in the name of a millenial art: Architecture.  This art is now becoming aware of a need to redefine where it should be applied, with its relative elements: where and how.

There will be a need to rediscover that Architecture (architecture) has a father, teacher, and mentor: the Genius Loci. This is to say that it’s the spirit of the site, with its cultural and historical background, its climate and morphology, its flora and multihued resources that guides and determines our creative process. 

Architecture that’s ecologically and economically sustainable, of   durable esthetic value, can have origins that could be attainable through the pursuit of these characteristics together with a correctly applied combination of tradition with technology, an ecologically and economically sustainable architecture of durable aesthetic value can be generated that is loyal with modernity. In the end, the site will become the protagonist, the building its inevitable tribute.

And last but not least, for us, architecture, the Great Art as it was referred to until the last century, and so neglected in our time, its plan for us will have to be to achieve the lofty objective of civic pride which has always characterized it, through the individualization of meaning that is fittingly found in the forms and spaces that challenge them. This challenge should never omit the principle of the designer’s social responsibility, and that its uncompromising objective will have to be all that revolves around mankind’s arcane values, revisited through modernity and through the anthropological synthesis of thought and feeling.