Architecture of redemption

Stop! I stop for a moment, I look at everything from above, from a bird's eye view of the world, blocked. Stopping time I see everything: in Italy the classical forms of Ancient Rome or the Renaissance, in Germany the rational and clean ones of the Bauhaus, in France the poetic forms of Art Nouveau. Every nation in the world with its own style. A past that characterizes the image of many cities of the present, flanked by a subsequent modernism now gone and the more recent postmodernism.

But now?

The architects of the present celebrated by indulging themselves like jesters at a court party, or like a people at the fall of a dictator. A sort of architectural deconstructivism has been grafted into it, as with Frank Ghery in the Guggenheim or in any of Zaha Hadid's works. It is enough to put myself a little higher to try to understand what is happening, I see a city project that works with individual architectures and everything works for man.

The present is architecture made with green, sustainable architecture, which is not just a set of ideas and technical aspects, but takes shape. Large and small studios try their hand at giving an image to bio-architecture, as a sort of tenence that everyone must respect in order to be fashionable, a standard.

I look north, above Amsterdam, I am near the Central station and looking towards the center and moving to the left I see piles of parked bikes, a new lifestyle for man, which respects nature, a skyline of bicycles and people and at the bottom of a building that stands like a boat stopped at the quay, Renzo Piano's Nemo. While strolling the bikes whiz to my left along with the pleasant sound of people talking, few cars and many trolleybuses, the victory of sustainability, a progress that is good for people. Even the water of the canals becomes a road, a way to avoid polluting, the boats look at the city from below and let you admire its shapes, the houses that seem to fall on people hypnotized by its colors. I move near Albert Kuiper Markt, entering a small street full of trees with yellow foliage and I find a park, but before entering it I look at the ground, in the ponds that reflect the trees like a tablecloth, gently resting leaves that create a canvas made from infinite shades of green and yellow.

I go down and move south to Holland, to Delft, where people can experience an architecture, the Technical University Library, which serves the man, who squats and shows his grand roof garden and from below, the transparency of the glass allows me to see the people who occupy that space, relaxing, having fun, and taking a break on this huge green bed. I feel the wind, as if I were in Primorose Hill, in the hills of the London park and I see people smiling because they are happy to be in this place, a happiness that only architecture or art can create.

If in Art Nouveau or in some cases in modernism, natural forms were designed and made available to architecture, now, having all the means, architecture reappropriates nature itself and uses it to redeem itself from the sins of pollution created by man.

Alberto Di Biase