With a simplification that is probably inaccurate, yet quite effective, we could say that architecture is made up of two equal parts.
The first is the stable, durable half: an expression of significance that maintains its validity over time. Here we find tried and trusted architectural knowledge accompanied by recognised, universal operational modes whose coherence and trustworthiness have been ascertained. These are modes that do not exclude new experimentation, but it will be of a type that probes the mysteriousness of the past as its vehicular means. The second half is focused on the here and now, the ever-changing and ephemeral, and on the current flux of events and information. Given its movement-driven nature, it has no use for knowledge or operational modes.

In a certain way, the second half is needed to destabilise and deconstruct the first half and free the contradictions that the latter alone would keep hidden – contradictions that make architecture more self-confident and resourceful. Similarly, the second part uses duration to select what is meaningful from the white noise of present reality. In this, the parts are not in opposition, but complementary. Throughout the 20th century, the two parts succeeded in creating an (unstable) equilibrium, a cognitive and creative exchange that gave exemplary results.

Starting with Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius, Mies van der Rohe and Frank Lloyd Wright, the majority of architects achieved positive polarity in their work. Indeed, most modern buildings, even those that are seemingly extraneous to their surroundings, are strongly rooted in the historical moment of the time and place where they were made, simultaneously demonstrating the possession of an ulterior dimension that connects them to the nucleus of architectural issues that are transmitted almost unaltered from era to era. However, in recent years things have changed. Architecture has forgotten its durable half and limited itself to the present. The drive to conceive design commitment as the pure transcription of what is happening now, as the extreme representation of instantaneity, as communication, has taken the upper hand.

By becoming a seismograph, as Hans Hollein has remarked in the past, the architect seems to have forgotten from how far away the signals come that he is trying to decipher. Superseding the avant-gardes that advocated the tabula rasa of Duration one century ago (although the cancellation of what was stable never came to pass because the avant-gardes themselves really did not want it to happen) many architects today tend to identify reality with what is happening at the very moment in which they are working.

This bearing down on the present, like in The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman, detracts a good deal of the essence of architecture. It takes away memory, the sense of place and, paradoxically, the capacity to "see" non-places. Above all, it cancels the vision of where we are headed. This is why I hope that architects go back and reconsider their decision to forget all that is the presence of duration in favour of the questionable fleeting moment.

Franco Purini
Architect