COSTRUIRE ABITANDO. MATERIALI PER L’ARCHITETTO CONTEMPORANEO

In recent times, among the two wars of the last century, the whole civil world assisted in an imposing phenomenon of regeneration of the technical fact: the standardization, the armed cement, the industrialization of the construction site, the structure to loom in steel, the dry assemblage, etc. In parallel to the robust progress of the technique of the constructions, it was assisted to one as many massive revisions of the constitutive values of the architecture jointly understood. In Italy, in 1932, G. Pagano on Casabella sets the theme of technique/aesthetics in which it faces the relationship among the updating of the expressive language of the Modern Movement. In New York, Louis I. Kahn; 1944, wrote the paper Monumentality, focusing his reasoning on the contemporary materials to use to create a contemporary monumentality. In the 50s, mainly in Italy, the research took place under the impulse of a renewed Continuità with history. After the '60s e '70s, in the 80s precisely, the explosive charge of Radical Architecture stormed; in 1969, Hans Hollein published Alles ist Architektur. These will be years of importan experimentations, and although they will largely remain, they will be able to influence successive generations of architects considerably. Reyner Banham already in On Tair Carn Isaf, New Statesman, had redefined the value of technology in the architectural phenomenon by encouraging architects to read "the emotions of science and ride the crest of a wave of inventions, discoveries and applications". We have reached the end of the '70s, the first 80s, in 1978. Rem Koolhaas, the very young architect and researcher, wrote his poster book from the title "Delirious New York" with his Manhattanism and the explicit doctrine of the hyperdensity redefined in the theory of the Bigness and with his compensation in the Junkspace. Until today, an era in which we are witnessing the radical transition from the canons of the modern city to the decanonization of the contemporary age and experiencing the "pathology of disappearing". Then, it is legitimate to question on what are the materials of our time, assuming that they should not be sought in the constructive technical factor, adequately understood, but in the new and more performing relational construction materials, often referred to as exponential technologies or the mass digital hyperlink. Made this clarification, we cannot afford to face the theme of the city's architecture and its reinvention without correctly putting it in the contemporary technological system, that is, inside the double network among real and virtual, to the different graduation of use and connection. Are you proceeding in great footsteps toward the predominance of the technological device on the meaning? Of the presence mediate her rather than of that real? It is permissible, to this point, to ask themselves, where are we going?