I love you desperately

"The postmodern response to the modern consists in recognizing that the past, since it cannot be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: with irony, in a non-innocent way. you love a woman, very cultured, and who knows that she cannot tell her << I love you desperately >>, because he knows that she knows (and that she knows that he knows) that Liala has already written these sentences. A solution. He may say: << As Liala would say, I love you desperately. >> At this point, having avoided false innocence, having clearly said that one can no longer speak innocently, but he will have told the woman what he wanted tell her: that he loves her, but that he loves her in an age of lost innocence. If the woman plays along, she will have received a declaration of love, equally. Neither interlocutor will feel innocent, both will have accepted the challenge of the past , of the already said that it cannot be eliminated, en both of them will play the game of irony consciously and with pleasure. "

(Umberto Eco, Notes to The Name of the Rose, Bompiani, 1983)

The same theory that Eco uses, of which time is the domain, could prove to be no more than an opportunity for architecture. In fact, the occurrence of opportunities sanctions the survival of architecture itself and investigating it in the present is the intent of this issue. What we promoted was to investigate the architectural, anthropological and cultural condition of today and try to open a gap between the myriad of theories and concepts that followed one another after postmodernism. What cultural and architectural condition are we in? What is time? Whether we are talking about architecture or love, it doesn't matter, after understanding that time depends on the things that happen to us and that it mixes with space, generating the greatest aporia of the project in which the future becomes the past, generating the present to predict and remember. , we asked Cristiana Collu, Paolo Portoghesi, Mosè Ricci and Carolina Vaccaro to help us define a line of research.

The texts of this issue do not intend to treat a truth as if it had already been found, it is not our intention to expose a doctrine with a method of synthesis or composition. The term post-truth is defined as "an argument that, based on widespread beliefs and not on verified facts, tends to be accepted as truthful, influencing public opinion." We would like to overturn the terms of this definition, transforming the improbable and often exhausting beliefs and research on the future in something that can be defined right now.What is decisive happens anyway and we end up, as Liala would say, to love them desperately.

Maura Mantelli