5+1AA Alfonso Femia Gianluca Peluffo

Conformism, stylistic transgression and detachment from reality are the distinctive traits of modern-day architecture. Together with a guilty feeling about form and beauty. Wonder and amazement are characteristic features of Italian and European poetics. The way architecture amazes and astounds has nothing to do with the modern-day approach of seeking approval or being spectacular. More precisely, astounding people is a way of understanding reality. That is its purpose. Taking a fresh look at reality. And even though it is extremely hard and painful to come to terms with the land, cities and people, architecture has a duty to envisage the future. A better future. Even romantically speaking. Denying reality, that attitude making modern-day architecture go from being blasé to cynical, must be defeated. This ethical and cultural battle will be waged through a kind of architecture which is carefully targeted and freely designed based on its context and history. Its language is free and contemporary. There is something we need to admit: we cannot have a second childhood. Our generation of architects still has that violence against the land, and the way it was left to oblivion, engraved in its memory. It cannot believe that development can coincide with progress. But it can believe that the only identity possible is the pluralism which characterises our continent, where one single uniform language has never been imaginable. This is Europe's role in modernity and modern-day society: working on a plural identity capable of designing specifically targeted buildings, which are machines for perception drawing on amazement and wonder as means of knowledge.