Time, Memory, Matter
Testo in italiano al seguente link
A single word runs through this issue like a subterranean current, surfacing in the most disparate places: the past, understood not as nostalgia nor as archive, but as an operative resource. Making the Past Productive – the title of the symposium held in Mendrisio in the autumn of 2024 – is not merely a theme, but a position: the knowledge sedimented in historical construction practices constitutes design material on a par with concrete, timber, or earth. To ignore it is a waste.
The theme is not new. The context is. The construction industry, to use an already overused expression, must halve its emissions by 2030: in Switzerland alone it handles around seventy million tonnes of materials each year, discarding a comparable amount. At a global scale, by mid-century the demand for new housing will exceed one hundred thousand units per day to keep pace with urbanization. In this scenario, the issue is how to look at the past without naivety.
This issue opens a window onto contemporary research through concrete cases that «get their hands dirty» with the realities of construction sites and quantification. From the preservation, transformation, and reuse of demolished components, the focus shifts towards material and constructive experimentation such as hybrid slabs in robotically compacted rammed earth, capable of achieving high performance with a drastically reduced carbon footprint. Along this trajectory, folded paper formwork reinterprets the lessons of Nervi, Morandi, and Musmeci through computational design and contemporary prefabrication. The past, here, is not cited: it is re-entered and reactivated – and, in the process, transformed.
Far from indulging in either technocratic efficiency or nostalgic regret, this publication avoids both shortcuts: to assume that optimising materials and processes alone can resolve a crisis that is also cultural, regulatory, and economic would be a conceptual error. Introducing robotics and artificial intelligence into an inert system such as construction has led less to its transformation than to an acceleration of its productive phase. Significant structural barriers remain: a lack of skills, regulatory frameworks slow to recognise reuse as a viable strategy and contracts that reward the new. Large-scale circularity therefore requires specific conditions: informed clients, committed designers, and flexible contractors. Today, these remain the exception rather than the rule. The point is not to oppose innovation and conservation – a now sterile dichotomy – but to redefine the relationship between technology and memory. The
connection between digital data and physical fabrication – encompassing both robotics and artificial intelligence – nevertheless reveals a tangible potential: to reduce the gap between design and construction by operating on available materials and existing processes. In parallel, the use of AI in conservation opens up tools capable of translating global climatic models into localised readings of degradation. In both cases, a shared awareness emerges: every construction decision incorporates time – that of extracted material, of the structure in use, and of its future life cycle. To design consciously means to inhabit this multiple temporality without reducing it. Carbon literacy thus emerges as a necessary condition of contemporary architectural judgement.
What is required, then, is a more secular relationship with the past. Many of the problems we perceive as new – resource scarcity, environmental constraints, economic pressures – have already been addressed in other forms, with other tools, and in other contexts. The point is not to mythologise those responses, but to recognise their problematic continuity. And yet certain images persist. To marvel at the historical stratifications of the wall of the Cathedral of Syracuse, where Greek Doric columns remain embedded within the Christian fabric, is to read architecture as the operational superimposition of different temporalities: not a pure origin, but a continuous assemblage. In the same way, the cyclical practice of the carpenters of the Ise Shrine – who periodically dismantle and rebuild the temple according to transmitted rules – demonstrates how prefabrication can be at once ritual, memory, and technique, rather than mere productive optimization.
These are cases that function as exempla rather than models to be replicated, and they challenge the notion of novelty without memory promoted by consumer society. It is a different kind of new, shaped by transformation, inventiveness, and constructive knowledge – one that seeks within complexity an impure yet highly dense language. Many contemporary buildings fail to address their composition as an explicit design question capable of integrating performance, duration, and meaning: within these pages, numerous cues emerge to rethink this «tectonic syncretism».
Design, increasingly fragmented by the multiplication of specialised disciplines, must persist as an act of resistance against every form of drift – intellectual or technological – that today affects the profession. In a field that claims to be reckoning with the past, the question is unavoidable: who is actually changing the way they work, and who is merely changing vocabulary?