Architects

The great past

The critical rereading of the context is an inescapable necessity for the interpretation of the article. It is not possible to judge a pre-existence without also putting it into a current context. The purpose of every creative act, in my opinion, is the recovery of the great past, making the most ancestral, primitive and archetypal forms that speak to us of mankind into current ones again.
The presence of man is always hidden beyond the shapes.
To resist the great rush that the daily struggle imposes on us all, man needs resources, antibodies such as to allow him the identity of his origins. Creative people often unconsciously chase the great past.
The concept of restoration, nowadays badly interpreted, ambiguous, rhetorical and reassuring hides the inevitable reality of the passing of time.
For this reason, I believe there is no restoration without transformation. The very idea of restoration is nostalgic: one intervenes to artificially prolong the life of a manufactured item, to make the sign of man’s labour survive, to make it resist the ravages of time.
A possible restoration, perhaps paradoxically the most authentic, which respects the historical-monumental identity, expression of man, can consist of letting the item perish in the slow flow of time and therefore to allow it to be witnessed also as a ruin to accept its demise that fell upon it at the end of its natural cycle.
Restoration in a certain sense denies this authenticity to offer other posthumous lives that in most cases are a real historical falsity.
To sum up, I believe that the only “restoration” possible for the architect, the only way to respect the authenticity of the past is that of intervening in such a way that it is also possible to read the sign of the new “modern” intervention.

Mario Botta