Background. Topics and context. Future 4.0: "The landscape of tomorrow".

The text starts from the awareness of the complexity cultural of the contemporary scenarious, that strongly challenges the very foundations of the discipline, attacked and made obsolete by the emergence of new models of living. This is evident on several fronts: - On the one hand, the “formal” categories are put into crisis by the process of embrittlement of the physical space, now evident on all fronts. On the other hand, those cultural categories that seem more connected to the characters of the architectural form, are questioned in relationship to their qualities of persistence and variation. Finally, the categories most connected to the technical and infrastructural processes of public space, increasingly involved in a market that tends to make the technical contribution arbitrary as a ‘constructive principle’ and to delegate the process of architecture construction to an exclusively product of menagement and production. At the breaking of the coincidence between these three aspects, a legitimate and disturbing question arises: We are faced with a ‘fatal loss’ of history, as it had already been predicted at the end of the nineteenth century in the face of the inevitable turning point advocated by the epocal transition, or the current destitution of values preludes to a possible ‘restart’ and reconstruction of meanings , as it has already happened in other closer historical periods? In the first case “the temptation to abandon oneself to the pathos of prophecies and epochal formulas” (C. Magris, 2001) preludes to a cultural regression in which the only anchor of salvation seems to reside in a possible return to the origins, even at the cost of an annulment of historical time within an apocalyptic vision of the universe. Position that, in its broadest sense, admits within the framework of hypotheses also its opposite, that is, the unconditional adherence to a technological mythology that today can be homologated to the triumphant ideology of innovation. In this perspective, already appeared cyclically in other periods of history, they would seem to obtain justification also those orientations that try to reconstruct an area of operation of architecture within the circuits imposed by fashions and the market, often outside the decisions and even the competences of the architects themselves. And this phenomenon often happens defining a pseudo-disciplinary apparatus of categories, concepts and parameters borrowed from other fields of knowledge, which often manage to construct an a posteriori judgment of the phenomena, without being able however to overcome the purely ascertaining level of the “observation”. This entails the obvious risks of a shift of the architect’s specific skills towards other disciplinary sectors, which not only fail to limit the boundaries of the ‘craft’ (‘metier’) within the new galaxy of skills that come into play, but often take away space from the same Future 4.0: “The landscape of tomorrow”. These points are deepened and explored also inside the other two articles included in this text.