Architect

The burial ground of history and the outstanding corpses

Among the most important contributions that Italy can offer to the contemporary scene is its special highly-developed restoration culture, fruit of extraordinary theoretical working and working experience on the heritage left by history – from the landscape to settlements, monuments and manufactured items to the most diverse and tiniest artefacts – that in a unique way typifies Italy, as is well known. Bristling with various positions (sometimes openly hostile to each other), the Italian restoration culture has been blessed with mental and operating tools, of uncommon efficacy and sophistication to preserve and transmit the concrete memory of places and things, the physical traces of people and the passing of generations to maintain their identity and differences.
The otherwise enormous job of active pietas for what remains of what came before us involves difficult but inevitable choices as much about method among what is to be preserved and how much we decide to abandon to a different destiny, highlighting the cultural hierarchy of our times, as about method, between pure conservation and
variable degrees of reintegration placing the accent on the authenticity of the material. Saving perforce only the bodies that we consider to be excellent in the boundless cemetery we have been left by history, is, at the same time both a
warning and a symptom. A warning to remind us that the “the flow of things” – as George Kubler writes in the start to The Shape of Time – never knew a total stop: everything that exists today is a replica or a variant of something that existed some time ago and so on, without interruption, right back to the dawn of human life”. A symptom to recognise the spread in our modern life of both a subtle unhealthy doubt about the same perennial flexible capacity for human transformation, variation and invention underlined by Kubler and a fear that is not so far beneath the surface regarding the effects of irreversibility of the processes of time on material of all types that masks a profound unease in our civilisation of today.

Sergio Polano