Weak and Diffuse Modernity

 
“This book proposes two goals: to analyze the innovations that the twenty-first century is introducing to the world of design, to the passage from the strong and concentrated modernity of the twentieth century to the weak and diffuse current one, and to investigate whether there is, in this passage, the possibility of imagining a future for non-figurative architecture.
An architecture that becomes an urban semiosphere, surpassing its constructing limits and becoming a producer of immaterial qualities that change over time.
[…] Today’s urban condition is made up of services, information technologies networks, product systems, environmental componential practice, microclimates, commercial information, and above all perceptive structures that produce systems of sensorial and intelligent tunnels that are contained within architecture, but cannot be represented by architecture’s figurative codes.
[…] It’s not the first time that architecture attempts to go ‘beyond architecture’, but in the twenty-first century this utopia seems to be for the most part realized within the contemporary city.”

This is a long essay comprising a decade of reflections and designs, in an attempt to reconcile conceptual reflections on architecture and the contemporary city, with a constant inclination towards a vision for the future. With this text, Andrea Branzi gives us a courageous act of faith and optimism towards an architecture that is still capable of listening to the city’s heart, while at the same time giving never-before-seen answers for the future of living together.