Secularization, memory and new revivals: the difficult rewriting of the present
The architectural project of re-use, in a context full of historical, cultural and environmental values such as the Alpine one, must inevitably confront with the list of conceptualizations elaborated during the twentieth-century modernity. First of all we have to think about memory which is the main raw material of architecture and its history, a theme on which the culture of restoration has been built, and on which the rhetoric of re-use has been shaped in recent times, with the gradual addition of other contemporaneity values such as soil consumption, sustainability, zero growth. The theme of memory seems in some cases to negotiate the one of secularization, a term that often comes to coincide with modernity. The modernity that has standardized and flattened the Alpine territory, raising questions about the meaning of the “encounter”, its ability to question prejudices, beliefs, and consolidated rhetorics. The “encounter” that takes place in the moment in which the contemporary urban culture succeeds in crossing landscape and Alpine architecture issues, creating disorientation, reopening the eyes of the observer and rebooting history by questioning the present. The “rewriting of the existent” therefore raises issues that are difficult to make explicit, such as the recognition and critical knowledge that are the basis of design responsibility. This is accompanied by the threat caused by a prescriptive approach which, in light of the aspects of control and of technological and environmental management of the mountain context, can lead to the drift of the practice which must be avoided only through the assumption of risk linked to the design itself.
