EDITORIAL

Five years ago, in 2005, the critic Charles Jencks wrote a book entitled Iconic Building, in which he speaks about the development, from the construction of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao onwards, of a simultaneously fascinating and unsettling phenomenon: the proliferation of a growing number of buildings with significant scenographic impact, part sculpture, part monument, that celebrate a progressively richer and opulent society, generated by the boom in commerce and global finance.
This phenomenon, Jencks pointed out, suffered in the wake of the successive collapse of the stock market, fluctuating oil prices, an increasingly precarious international political scenario and the risk of private bankruptcies and a few nations. All the same, and notwithstanding the crisis, the demand for iconic buildings has not diminished.
Anywhere there is construction there is a request for landmarks, indications of faith in a future that does not necessarily corresponds with real forecasts.
In parallel with the demand for monumental icons there is, however, also a need for sustainable buildings, characterised by low energy consumption and the ability to generate a pleasurable, non-stressful habitat and capable of restoring a primordial and unmitigated relationship with the natural world.
These two requests – building icons celebrating the progress of modern digital technologies and the creation of a simple and natural habitat – may appear contradictory. There are many who believe that the only possible solution to both lies in the age-old recipe of constructing two parallel worlds. One dedicated to business and the celebration of progress that takes form in the Central District, filled with rivalling skyscrapers or structures with significant impact, and another dedicated to residential life and relaxation, with human-scaled dwellings and a more direct contact with nature.
This solution, practiced above all in the American model of the downtown vs. the suburbs has, however, demonstrated a number of inconveniences. They include lengthy travel times between the home and the office and the spatial monotony of the two areas, resulting from a separation of functions that only just made sense in the early 20th century, when the space of work was rigorously differentiated from the domestic realm, and which no longer makes any sense at present, when the confines between productive time and free time are progressively more subtle and blurred.
The buildings and objects of design presented in this issue of Compasses, in one way or another, propose the identification of a solution to this dilemma. The hospital by Emilio Ambasz begins with nature as it seeks to recover technology. Herzog & de Meuron’s museum is generated by the unmistakable use of an icon, though it opens up in an unexpected and enchanting way to include the surrounding landscape. In the rail station by Santiago Calatrava, technology seeks to transform itself into nature.
Michele De Lucchi’s renovation in Venice is dominated by a sense of scale, of serenity, of a balance between the old and the new. The other projects are of no less interest. For each, the objective is that of combining, in varying doses, nature and the power of the icon, in order to rediscover a new sensuality and overcome the period of crisis we are currently all experiencing.

Luigi Prestinenza Puglisi and Anna Baldini