Dell’utilità e della rovina del moderno

Architecture can be considered for its use value because of the performance that is able to provide. Such a performance is not absolute or unchangeable, but is usually linked to a specific time frame, which is defined by mutation cycles of housing needs. Obsolescence in our realm can be real or induced, temporary or irreversible, cyclical or incremental, leading to significant differences. But is obsolescence real? Or does it belong only to the perception of the user subject? In the field of the protection of modern architecture is by no means new the paradox, according to which, buildings of strict functionalist derivation cannot accept a change of function, without a betrayal and a substantial loss of their very raison d'être. But anyway what is obsolescent goes with the option of upgrading or abandoning. Where this feeling affects the perception of the users, the option of their update goes through education, communication. Where it affects the building, abandonment takes the form of an intermediate step towards the incipient creation of a ruin, but modern time has no time for ruins: in our hypermodernity what is obsolete is destined for substitution well before becoming ruin. The concept is different from that of debris and that of unfinished. Ruins can be a product or a process. As a process is the dynamic outcome of changes, stratifications and transformations that architecture registers, like a palimpsest that belongs to two times, past and present. The ruins are both the defeat of the Modern and the very necessary transition for its entry into history. The ruin of the modern has no possibility of existing except temporarily, but at that time it can have a function and a use of its own, as an expression of a pure time that helps us to detach ourselves from the idea of a continuity with the legacy of the Modern, admitting that it can age and therefore can be appreciated through its ruins.