Architettura nel farsi delle cose

When compared with the central-eastern ones, the Western Alps have experienced a growing marginality in the new century. After all, getting out of the heavy legacy left by twentieth-century modernisation – abandonment of territories and tourism – is not easy. Today, however, there seems to be some evidence of a radical change in sensitivity, characterised by an awareness of the potential and limits of the contemporary architecture in relation to local dimension. This is how environment, landscape, history, traditions, heritage are no longer just a “fetish” to be exhibited for the mountain users, but become the threads with which contemporaneity tries to mend the ties interrupted with the territories. Quality architecture no longer seems to be just a self-referential exercise of composition, but a conscious opportunity to translate the demands, imaginaries, expectations, identities of the territories, in physical projects. Projects that are within the processes and that necessarily respond to compromises, in which sometimes the aesthetic-formal aspect is only one among all that control the project, that become the result of extremely diversified and contrasting questions. This working condition, always at the edge of the processes, inevitably also affects the forms of architecture, in which the difficulties and precariousness of the operational context become a prerequisite for the characterisation of the figurative and architectural aspects.