ARCHITETTURA COME MATERIA SOCIALE [Architecture as social material]

There has always been a dichotomy in critical studies of architecture - between figurative, abstract and metaphorical readings; and visions of territorial planning formed by observing developments on a large scale. In the last three decades, this dichotomy has worsened, provoking an inexorable distancing of architectural practice from some of its basic terms, among which the social demands it is motivated by. We can see people taking radical positions, which are translated into extreme functionalist phenomena and into processes of predominant globalisation characterising the generic city: these processes are based on «abandoning what does not work (what has survived use) by breaking the asphalt of idealism with the air hammer of realism, and accepting whatever grows in its place»