Sette dialoghi tra scienza e poesia. Note per il progetto contemporaneo

The act of design – in Italian progettare, etymologically gettare avanti which means ‘throwing forward’ the prefiguration and transformation of a possible reality – today lives a condition of ever increasing difficulty in identifying operational models. Among the many, seven reading filters are identified here, selected for operational paradigms of a suitable design action. I. Organization of the process and status of the project. The modern era establishes a dialectic between specialization and coordination of ideas and actions. The complication of relationships involving the design, construction and management of the built environment, claims an ‘organizational’ culture of the project. The experience of architecture in terms of method, and not just of outcome, represents in this perspective an essential passage of the formative process. II. Knowledge and systemic project. In the context of a growing need to strengthen and articulate the competences within the organizational structures and the coordination tools between professionals, disciplinary areas and activity sectors, the project is more and more to incorporate logic of systemic nature. III. Technological innovation and continuity. The impact of new technologies and the process of globalization brings out the importance of the relationship between local and global, as a result of which the homogenization of languages and the enhancement of local identities and continuity as expressions of cultural, social, economic and productive values correspond equally to the integration. IV. Place and environmental paradigm. The actions aimed at a policy of sustainability and the consolidation of environmental culture equally involve the fields of project production and construction process. The relationship with the environment must be interpreted as an opportunity for research and experimentation: a ‘technologically advanced’ project represents an ‘environmentally conscious’ approach. V. Complexity and rationality. Architecture is a reflection of a more general complexity that characterizes training and the evolution of skills: the progressive expansion of skills, the involvement of disciplines articulated by sectors and fields and the expansion of traditional knowledge and tools require rational approaches, able to establish hierarchies within a harmonious unity, the architecture, which cannot be without exactness, rigor and measure. VI. Integrated project and creativity. The design, requiring an organization adapted to the specificity of the individual intervention and its demanding framework, is called to strengthen its role as a tool of synthesis by encouraging a methodological renewal, constant expression of feasible decisional processes, arising through a collaboration of ‘advisor’ type between specialist skills of the sector. VII. Technique and poetics. Only the architect can take on the task of combining the most contracted times of contemporaneity with ‘the long time of elaboration’ endogenous to the architectural practice, as well as the practices of the market economy with the ‘artistic practices of the architectural project’ and the ‘processes of modifications, corrections, discussions that accompany its elaboration’.