In Azha, nothing you see is the result of a fully conscious choice. Those who live there have not only had to adapt their needs, priorities, and ways of life to the spaces they inherited; much more complicated than that, they have had to shape their very own existence according to a paradigm they never chose, and which they often do not even perceive.

Azha is the outcome of choices made in the past, by someone else, with different priorities, different motivations, and according to different narratives. Someone who, in their own time, may have been blinded by a crazy dream of freedom and redemption, and therefore decided to gift the city with spaces for encounter and contemplation: arcades, parks, libraries, and universities.

Or someone else who, rather than being inspired by a dream, was consumed by a genuine hallucination made of twisted and toxic obsessions, and therefore imposed upon the city a sinister and rhetorical character: erasing entire neighbourhoods to replace them with monumental buildings whose underground chambers hosted torture and death; vast open spaces where thousands upon thousands of young men in uniform could march in formation; colossal sculptural monuments celebrating one bloated figure or another. Perhaps memory no longer returns the deafening noise produced by that accumulation of memories. It would be unbearable. Yet, within the subconscious of each inhabitant, there remains a kind of genetic imprint that drives them to make choices they believe to be conscious, but which, in reality, are not entirely their own. And so, perhaps, someone finds themselves opening a pastry shop, convinced that this is simply what they have always wanted to do.

But the truth is that, centuries earlier, in the countryside that once surrounded the city, endless sugar cane plantations stretched as far as the eye could see. There, generations of women and men had broken their backs cultivating and processing the crops, stacking sacks of precious harvests in the warehouses by the harbour, before loading them onto ships bound for distant markets.

Or perhaps someone finds themselves defending ideas of freedom and justice, convinced that it is their own individual conscience speaking.

But that conscience is not entirely theirs. It is also the voice of the young men and women who, in the past, built barricades in those very streets to defend — often with their own lives — the freedom that this person can now enjoy. Perhaps someone marvels at how tolerant the society they live in has become, unaware that this tolerance is the response to centuries of persecution: of night squads searching for dissidents from house to house, of fear and terror embedded into everyday life. The city appears to absorb these experiences, trying to normalise them. When necessary, it even attempts to erase them.

But in truth, it never forgets. If you know how to listen to it, the city is always ready to reveal its secrets. Even the most unspoken ones. In Azha, scars and ruins remain. And with them, its inhabitants — willingly or unwillingly — must come to terms every single day.  ( from: Tales from Remore Places, Almost Invisible, 2021)

 Architecture is dead. 

No-one noticed it.

Because we were too busy with something else.

But is dead.

Died in those anonymous, alienating and miserable suburbs in which

life, together with the buildings that bear it, fades out of all meaning,

 in those abnormal, air-conditioned vastnesses,

which we call shopping centers,

 In the enclosed urbanizations in the fancy suburbs where the

barbecue fumes pervade the gardens during the weekend.

 In multi-story condominiums where, like pigeons, the tenants

squeeze one on the other, annoyed by the loud noises of the child upstairs.

 Died in those urban cancers where political and environmental air

poison millions.

Died in the sinister silence of a vacant office in Dubai.

 In the fetid and threatening alleys of the Favela Rosinha.

 At the kilometric dark alleys of the Corviale in Rome.

 Architecture is dead,

just like that.

Quietly,

 with no special commemorations.

 Only majestic skeletons remain emptied of all content and hope.

 Imposing ruins of a time that never existed and never will be.

 Tribute of Piranesian memory to the madness of an era - the modern

one - which from its name could have left the intuition of its stratospheric

egocentrism.

 A broken scream of a discipline born to celebrate life, but which

instead has become the symbol of its most brutal contempt.

 Architecture, it is now clear, is dead.

After all, it is not a tragedy,

without architecture the world has survived for centuries,

centuries that we today remember as barbaric,

but that during which people continued to live their disordered and insignificant lives,

in their stumble-through spaces,

in agglomerates built on alleys smelling of piss and horse dung.

 Mankind has always done so, without great fuss.

 But then when suddenly it appeared tracing its daring circles in

the sky, this curious discipline whose true usefulness is not yet understood

has always left everyone speechless.

 And as bewitched acrobats, in those circles, we all jumped in.

Because this is precisely the magic of Architecture.

 As in the distant 1480 when a handful of Florentine gentlemen

found themselves, so by magic, to discuss politics protected by the generous

vaults of the Loggia dei Lanzi.

We had just awakened from dark and vertical centuries.

The city finally no longer owned by only one single citizen,

wanted to celebrate it by making itself beautiful.

 And to do this they dared to point the beacon of knowledge toward those

latitudes far away centuries where, between the misty mountains of the

Peloponnese, they sensed that the brightest of the future was hidden.

 That dream called the Renaissance, as we know, was overwhelmed by

the disproportionate greed of the Popes and the great European monarchies.

The austere lines, soaring and full of ingenious ingenuity, evaporated,

effectively, in a pedantic exercise of affected forms.

 A cloying regurgitation of putti and garlands that made it clear that the party was over.

So that epic ended, with the holds of Spanish galleons gold-filled returning from the Americas,

the European courts revived by immense looting,

and the Roman church fierce in manipulating the minds of its devotees.

 For the next five hundred years, everyone returned to their ordinary glittering monotony.

 Western history was too busy with its bloody and ruthless power

games to be able to look at a civic ideal on which to build a new architecture.

 To find it, it was necessary to wait until 1958 when an army of white-collar workers

magically found themselves again commuting in the main lobby of the New York Central Terminal

heading for their office on the twenty-fourth floor of 375 Park Avenue.

 A homologated dream, finely "engineered" to seduce

millions not with rifles and uniforms, but with the simple thought that in the

evening they would be received by their elegantly dressed wife and a roast

turkey in the oven of their beautiful villa. All with the same. All purchased

with a twenty-year loan at a reduced rate.

 It was the crowning of that bourgeois myth that Marx so clearly prophesied.

 A myth that Wright made epic, Mies elegantly absolute,

Le Corbu solid as a faith.

 And in this case, the greed to corrupt this conformist and conciliatory dream was not that

of the great European monarchies, but that of a crucible of anonymous Wall Street lobbyists.

 That greed, which although not officially crowned with the blessing of God

certainly had nothing to envy with that of Louis XVI of France

has imposed his ruthless rules undisturbed in the last fifty years.

For all this time had continued insatiably to devour everything it has

found in its path.

No matter what the price was.

 In the name of that villa, of that turkey in the oven.

 Because if it is easy to resist a rifle, it is much more difficult

to do so with a turkey in the oven.

 Today, like five hundred years ago, the immense looting is going on

stronger than ever.

 A looting that we call Capitalism and that in only fifty years has

decimated the natural resources of the planet, irreparably altered its balance,

transformed its people into an army of alienated buyers, all with the suit, the

designer hat and a pair of sneakers.

And in architecture, Capitalism has always found its

perfect lover, bitch and curvy, ready, for a diamond and a bit of attention,

to satisfy the most unmentionable desires.

Just as five hundred years before, those strictly pure lines of 375 Park

Avenue turned into the vulgar affectation of the Caesars Palace in Las Vegas.

And that affectation followed for the next thirty years reaching the hard-core pornography that Zaha Hadid, 

the Salomé of contemporary architecture, slammed on our faces aware that was going to be its well-deserved epigraph.

 So long Architecture. You are dead. Long live Architecture!

luca.antonio.bonifacio@gmail.com

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