Dalla "società dello spettacolo" allo spettacolo della società

Abstract

The dismission of the industrial city gives us an "unproductive" waiting condition, with regard to which three different strategies can be recognized. The first, spread in Europe since the second half of the 1970s, has elegantly removed this cumbersome presence, assimilating it to a "gap”, to redeem by invoking the "authority of the past” at achieving a continuity with the morpho-typological principles derived from the existing urban layout. The second, which consolidates in the mid-1990s, sees the chance of emptiness as an opportunity to be relocated in the reference horizon of globalization, eradicating it from the local dimension in favor of de-territorialization processes which are not given a chance of control. The third, generated by the crisis of the creative finance, requires a reflection on the "landscape of abandonment", which, due to the state of affliction which the traditional subjects of transformation experience, open up to an unprecedented crisis of the discipline. The writer believes that the prolongation of the waiting condition can become an occasion for a profound rethinking of the architect's profession and his culture, provided that people know how to look at the reality for what it is, avoiding both the "fascination" for re-composition of the lost unity and the "selfsatisfaction" for the equivalence of solutions, generated by the temporary absence of constraints, which the crisis liberates and entails.