Forms of Memory: Architectural Design for the Ancient in the Contemporary City

The relationship between old and new is one of the main theme of contemporary architecture. The comparison between the contemporary city, the ruins of archaeological complexes, the myth of their, is however a controversial theme. It’s always destined to find a new balance, since the Modern time, when archaeology was defined as an autonomous discipline with respect to architecture. Since then we suffer for the ‘fatal separation’ between architecture and archaeology: united by the same desire to question time and shapes, but separated due to the outcomes of their re-searches. If the first, in its most enlightened expressions, proposes to carry on the deep meaning of crumbling shapes through new logical-syntactic compositions, the second limits itself to “reconstructing the history and art of remote times through the remains of the past, on which it bases a series of reflections, reconstructions, interesting conjectures, highly scientific, but absolutely infertile for life”. The most orthodox interpretation of archae-ology leads to the conservation as a static form of knowledge, crystallizing the event in the suspended time of a still-image. But when architecture applies in the concrete of a layered site, it should instead lean towards a perspective of renewed knowledge that admits the re-construction as a tool to reach the intelligibility of the underlying potential shape.

In order to the main topic of this conference this contribution aims to show how it’s possible today work on the relationship between old and new not only for conservation reasons, rather to add ‘something new’ that can explain ‘something old’. One of our recent project is a paradigm which thinks on the ontological relationship between architecture and archaeology. The goals of the project is understand and renew the urban and landscaping relationships that have historically characterized the image of these sites.