Unbuilding Architecture

The idea of an ideological potentiality for architectural re cycling is obviously anything but unprecedented. All along the20th Century art first and then architecture became critically conscious of an attitude of re-using, re-creating, re-manipulating physical and conceptual materials that had been there forever, from the Roman stones to Diocleziano’s Palace in Split, from Duchamp’s Mona Lisa with Moustache to Andy Warhol, from the Superstudio’s proposal to build on top of the Colosseum to the more recent Palais de Tokyo. What happened in the last years is that this infinite legacy came to react with ecological and social emergencies, creating the conditions for a very interesting phase for architectural research, design, criticism, eventually pushing us to reshape our academic curriculums and programs. All this made in fact clear to all how architecture between the end of the second millennium and the start of the third has had to learn how to deal with full and void, the existing and the new, urban and anti-urban, and always with the same know-how and the same project intensity, keeping clearly in mind the fact that it is no longer possible to consider these dyads in terms of a pure dialectic opposition. More specifically, the growing mass of buildings of every type, nature and value that end their life cycle on our territories has made clear the inadequacy of the traditional cultures of restoration and reuse before the myriad houses, schools, public buildings, factories, warehouses that in most cases didn't deserve a conservative approach, and that for another thousand reasons weren't and aren't worth demolishing. Hence, what we urgently need is a recycling culture—to Re-cycle—that is as bold and unfaithful as mainstream restoration is attentive and (not always sincerely) faithful to the original, and just as fast, uncanny and indeterminate as the usual approach to "reuse" is pedantic, punctilious and Architecture is a negotiable art, which produces its language via the mediation of three different types of claims: those of a technical nature, those related to its own history and the rules inherent to the discipline, and those of society and its times. When the architect's productive, creative or political obsession decides to identify architecture entirely or prevalently with one of these three claims, it exposes it to the risk of self-referentiality, it undermines its social utility, it dangerously dries up its sources of energy. To us, Re-cycle is a perfect device to credit the relation with society an appropriate role in the design process, i.e. it is a possible and accessible solution to many of the problems of contemporary architecture, obsessed by self-referentiality and technology