Archaeology and nature: hyblean cultural landscape and territorial ...

2. The sign of the place and its mathematical rationalization (R. Valenti)
Care for the environment, in a broad and articulate conception, comprises all those aspects of life that lead
towards respecting and safeguarding nature, seen in its fullest meaning, in which it is possible to include the
human component through its combining into communities.
The cognitive approach, preceding the project and its representation, is based on models that tend to
simplify the complexity of the interacting components that, in their arrangement in system, constitute the
problem to tackle and resolve. These initial considerations mean that there is a consequential effect between
architecture, place and thought; namely that every architectonic choice, that takes the complete and complex
panorama of a site into serious consideration, must, given the peculiarity of the task entrusted, start off from
intense thought and interconnect, unavoidably, with the problematics connected with the site’s sustainable
development.
Since it is known that a place conditions and influences the formation of man, and since man with his ideas
makes the project evolve, which its turn conditions the place, it follows that the preliminary reports and
researches that consider the site a complexity to be interpreted and used, are grounded in this continuous
cycle.
From the viewpoint of composition, the approach should tend towards a form of union and synthesis of the
contemporary with tradition, oriented towards research in which innovation is combined with the specificities
of the tangible and intangible signs found in the situation in which the intervention is being made. Rational
thought, of functional and constructive logic, is nurtured and supported by the intuition of the overall sense of
the environment. Overall, because a single idea may give resolute answers in different fields, from the
economic to technological, to the social and environmental.
Indeed, regarding stabilized urban contexts, the social structure, in a given temporal and geographic frame,
expresses, in the context of specific productive and economic conditions of the building process, the
requirements and the ways of life of a determined group.
In this context, with reference to design and project creation, it is important to ask what the spatial and
material limit is in which the process of growth and living world can coexist without coming into conflict.
It is a widely shared concept that architecture reflects and expresses civil and social life in which it operates,
in continuous evolution and heavily influenced by the digital revolution. This latter has produced determining
effects on the aspects of aggregation of daily life, among which one that is closely linked to design, namely
the dissolution of the concept of space, in its strictly physical sense, which also entails a model of
individualistic society, tending towards the globalization of expectations and desires.
The virtual dimension, wherein different cultures find a common denominator, on the other hand, implies the
risk of a composite approach that renders architecture a separate issue from the physical space with which it
interacts, with the consequent process of developing an a-topos that translates built realities into unknown
and non-characterizing elements, dissolving, from a social point of view, that fiduciary relationship between
the inhabitants of a place that in the societies preceding us and in the present small communities proves to
be a substantial component of human life.
Fig. 4: ODBC – Odile Decq, Benoȋt Cornette, Museum of Liaunig Collection, Neuhus, Austria, 2004.
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