in Abitare n° 516, 10, 2011 pp. 110-123
Natura urbana Nature in cities
Alter high-tech and eco-friendly, sustainable architecture now has another string to its bow. It’s called awareness. What can we expert in the future ?
Alessandro Rocca. The Craftsman and the City Gardener.
* (Italia, 1959). A searcher after new ecologies of architecture, technology, art and landscape. His books include « Architecture Low Cost / Low Text» (Actes Sud, 2010) and «Natural Architecture» (Princeton Architectural Press, 2007)
The maelström of intangible energy in today’s world is now being opposed by a return to manual work in which nature plays a leading role. Beyond the archistars and the dictates of high-tech and sustainability, forms of soft radicalism are gathering momentum, feeding on new ideal which aims to remodel the economic and social costs of architecture. This is much more than just low cost / low tech, energy saving and the use of alternative sources. It’s a proliferation of ideas and proposals (that fill architecture Websites and magazines), a viral, choral movement that is updating architectural database with new questions and new needs. Systematic use of the Web as a forum of choice is changing the ways in which new ideas themselves known; the high-profile exploits of the past are giving way to a collective process that proceeds one small step at a time, that seizes on small-scale, local opportunities to innovate and experiment what might eventually lead to results of more widespread interest. This is a phase in which proposals based on weak assumptions, tight budgets and marginal situations are emerging, as alternative visions to those of the big architectural firms, which use their technological resources to test new high-tech versions of sustainability. For example, leading Japonese architects like Kazuyo Sejima (as in his curatorship of the most recent Venice Architecture Biennale) and Shigeru Ban, and Europeans like Peter Zumthorq, continue to explore low-cost / low-tech, experimental /ideal possibilities of architecture, rather than those linked to mere technological and formal virtuosity. New approaches and space to think are required, as well as courageous and perhaps even dangerous liaisons because environmental questions demand urgent attention and requires architects to work alongside experts in technology and ecology (with varying degrees of social emphasis), as well as in new fields such as those connected to landscape, agriculture and the environment.
Sometimes the radical approach of the 1960s resurfaces with new cross-disciplinary connections, cultural métissages, and a desire for participations and consensus. Increasingly aware of the hostility engendered by the underlying models and disastrous outcomes created by the modernist city, architects are seeking to win back public trust by using friendly, understandable methods and images, themes and myths that are central to today’s culture and ideology. For example, the body is seen not only just a functional device, as in classical ergonomics, but also as an active subject and means of communication which transcends the indices and prescriptions of the environmental sciences, and defines itself in terms of customised behaviors, spaces, uses and objects.