maria terzano, J. director
marco magliozzi, j. editor

It seems that only today have people woken up and decided to talk about environmental sustainability. Like a Pandora’s vase, this concept includes a multitude of shades, more or less variously and illustratively discussed and affirmed by our contemporaries. However, talking about environmental sustainability means above all proposing an operative model that horizontally involves all fields of human activity, including the economic, ecological, social and historical-cultural spheres. In the large family of environmental sustainability, one of the closest relatives is certainly the construction industry, which is known to be one of the most impactful on the environment. Considering a building’s full lifecycle, the sector accounts for approximately half of all extracted materials, half of total energy consumption, one third of water consumption and one third of waste generation [1]. Considering these alarming data, it is unthinkable, today, to reason the birth-life-death path of a building according to a linear model. Considering death as the last stage of its existence, we can easily foresee a future populated only by “waste”. So what would happen if the ‘waste’ was transformed into an active resource? The answer to this question is the circular economic model.  This is an economic and cultural paradigm that involves the reintroduction of waste material into a new life cycle. An action that forces the line to become a circle.  It is a process, therefore, that causes an inevitable overcoming of the ‘take-make-waste’ model in favour of one oriented towards a ‘’take-make-take’’. 

The linear development model suggests an economic advantage that takes place in a time frame. If the life of an object has a beginning and an end, then its time will also have a beginning and an end.  Subverting this worldview, the object is designed to never run out of utility. Consequently, its presence in time is continuous. If, therefore, object and time are inextricably linked, when the object is regenerated, its time is not consumed. If we want to give an image to the time, its shape will no longer be a line but a circle. 

Assuming that circular economy and time are a unicum and that the construction sector is one of the main players in this new economic system, what is the relationship between architecture and time? Architecture is a bridge that connects the man of today to the man of the past, that allows us to enjoy the present and that potentially opens a path to a future that is still unknown. 

“Architecture emancipates us from the grip of the present and allows us to perceive the slow, therapeutic flow of time”[2]. It thus gives us the opportunity to be an active part of this flow, allowing us to travel fluidly through it.  However, the birth-life-death paradigm, which would seem to derive from a canonical conception of the flow of time, does not always have an accurate correspondence in architecture. Many times, buildings are intentionally kept alive in the moment when they are about to take their last breath. 

If, in fact, society is an active participant of the time and in this time builds its architecture, it is precisely society that has the capacity to recognise a value in an architectural object that is about to fall. This value, i.e. a memory, is largely a reconstruction of the past with the help of data collected from the present.  Therefore, the past is not preserved unchanged but “reconstructed in the present according to changes, needs and interests, which over time have modified and become an expression of society.”[3] 

“It is likely that this value of history, as a collective memory, understood therefore as the relationship of the collectivity with the place and the idea of it, gives us or helps us to understand the meaning of the urban structure, of its individuality, of the architecture of the city which is the form of this individuality.”[4]  

Collective memory therefore carries in itself the concept of continuity, it keeps from the past only what is still alive and is in continuous flow. If, however, in order to design we have a natural need to know what happened in the past, memory should not be seen as a eulogy of what has been and always will be, but rather a celebration of the continuity of the time in which we live as well as a universal vision of our history. This ability, in contrast to the last century, of being able to see things in their fullness, allows us, as contemporary humans, to read the testimonies of the past as objects that are still alive. On the contrary, a fragmentary view of time ‘leads to an evaluation of events as isolated points rather than as elements of a development which, with its many different facets, becomes part of history. The demand for more intimate contact with history is the natural result of this condition. To be in closer contact with history: in other words, to live our lives in larger temporal dimensions. Present events are simply the most apparent segments of a continuum’ [5]. If, therefore, collective memory is opposed to the conventional idea of flowing, then perhaps it is the interpretation of time itself that needs to change.  A time that, therefore, is not always linear but that can be twisted, contracted and dilated (Purini, 2011). It does not follow a constant line, nor does it perpetuate itself in its movement, but it is often Ouroboros as Nietzsche pictured in the philosophical discourses of Zarathustra. The snake eating its own tail is therefore a symbol of the circular flow of time. So if time is cyclical, how can what once was, persist in its being?

[1] European Commission, (2020). Level(s) [Viewed 02.2021]. Available from: https://ec.europa.eu/environment/topics/circular-economy/levels_en
[2] Pallasmaa J. (1996) The eye of the skin, Chichester: Wiley & Son, p.69, (trad. M.Terzano, M. Magliozzi)
[3] Sulpizi E. (2014) Memoria e spazio urbano, Roma: Sapienza Università di Roma, Dipartimento Architettura e progetto
[4] Rossi, A. (1995) L’architettura della città, Torino: CittàStudiEdizioni, pg.180, (trad. M.Terzano, M.Magliozzi)
[5] Giedion, S. (1984) Spazio, tempo e architettura, Milano: Hoepli Editore, pg. 7, (trad. M.Terzano, M.Magliozzi)