Architecture and Town Planning Operating Instructions: Saving Architecture Might Save the Italian Economy

It is not heretical to say that nowadays, if air travelers were forced to make an unscheduled landing in some location that was not their original destination, and tried then to understand where they were by looking at the buildings around them, they would have no way of understanding what corner of the Planet Earth they had reached!

Almost everything the twentieth century has produced in Architecture – and apparently the twenty-first is about to follow suit – seems condemned to assume a temporary character, as a result of the “Futurist” conception on Architecture. Conception is totally divorced from what people want . . .

Now, given this situation in its entirety, even the ancient heritage is being undermined. It is more and more difficult and expensive to find the personnel capable of performing manual work to restore historical buildings. Unless this situation is reversed, and there is a rude awakening, it will no longer be possible to restore our artistic treasure. In the light of all that, I wonder how we can speak of modernity in relation to the Architecture of the century that has just ended?

(Italian and English facing text)