We often find ourselves thinking about the recent past, for the acknowledged purpose of identifying potentially helpful factors with which to analyse, interpret and better appreciate our present.

Were we to now define what has most characterised this period, and if we may be forgiven such a bold question and its subsequent answer, we would venture to suggest that it has been a time of waiting. The end of a century, which in this case coincided with the end of a millennium, set the perfect conditions for a spasmodic expectation, the wait for a seismic change in our lives. Marking the passage from one era to another, it sparked a relentless drive towards newness for its own sake.

Culture has failed to react to the overwhelming power of technology, unable to build a philosophy capable of sustaining people’s lives at such a key moment in their history. It has failed to counter the economic and technological pipedreams that have gradually created new myths to be pursued and new standards to be set. It has simply chased after false progress. The many technical means already possessed at the end of the 20th century together with all the incredible new, ever more potent, inebriating and apparently cheap media marketed in recent years seemed sufficient to run our lives. They appeased our yearning for innovation and progress, our interest in the future that awaits us. This state of affairs relegated culture and thinking to a lesser if not downright decorative role, one that is in all events superstructural and no longer necessary to people’s lives. The most striking consequence of all this has been that the cultural debate gradually became less interesting. Criticism, likewise, grew steadily feebler, almost disappearing altogether. The result is that everything and its opposite – in other words nothing – began to apply. Having only themselves for comparison, everybody felt authorised to do anything without having to answer to anyone. So began the epoch in which   everyone does everything. However, the important things, the ones that mattered, were being done elsewhere, except that nobody could improvise on them.

The wondrous machinery of advancing technology could clearly not allow   everyone to do whatever they chose. Those worth their salt, the ones who really knew what they were doing, advanced. The others lagged behind because that more serious world had no room for the spurious. In the now superstructural culture, on the other hand, there was plenty to do for everybody. What is more, they could do whatever they felt like, appealing a naive freedom of their own from everything else; the worst thing is that the product of their efforts was never subjected to any criticism. No one was judged by what they were doing. Their existence depended only on the fact that they were doing a given thing and not on the value of what they were doing. That is how our world came to be filled with innumerable people   rotating around crafts, products, disciplines and institutions with never any hierarchy of values, never any critical judgement lending authority to this or that work, thought or project. Everything has become self-referential.

To return to where we started from, we can say that this period of waiting has, instead, forgone any critical thinking in favour of a more pacific technical reasoning. This has over time produced only self-referential results and no longer a collective, shared authority. Now that people’s feelings about life are radically changing, now that many are again wondering “what” is happening around them and what they would like to be happening, now that the conditions are again right to introduce meaningful changes into our lives, it has become vital to pause to consider these matters.

The conditions are now right once again to allow architecture, for example, and more generally the disciplines linked to habitation to drive a better use of the territory and construction, more in keeping with our resources and expectations. Hence “doing” – what we do, what each one of us is capable of doing – is once again central to the debate. Our times seem at last and to have permanently shaken off the barren ideological fetters of this recent past. Architecture had been trying to compete with the excessive power of technology to the tune of ever more exaggerated formalisms, as bizarre as they were transient, or futile inventions and needless expenditure, to reference Palladio. Today, first of all, common sense seems to have been restored, along with a readiness to share work with others. For this reason, we like to define the times we are living in as ones of doing, magic times to be lived to the full before new ideologies, always lying in wait, make themselves felt again. If this is true, we can see how important it is to understand who does what.