Testo tratto da Architetti.com

It is fundamentally a misunderstanding. It is a misunderstanding to believe that things last a long time. Much depends on the relationship to the time we destine them to live for. It is an act of respect and mutual understanding to consider the perceptual condition or behavioural experience relatively. In other words, to realise how architecture in its two different spatial and temporal forms, being par excellence a four-dimensional art (first and foremost an art, but always an art), allows one to share in rhythm, acceleration, stasis, flight. As in a flow of sonority, forms, colours and materials appear, sometimes magically also rules and meanings (indeed rarely, very rarely), because one of the primary functions of architecture that is activated is precisely this: to make something appear, almost to materialise it, the interrogative about our being here and now, while we would like to live in another moment and elsewhere (which is also an important category of space).

[…] Rosario Assunto, born in 1957 in Forma e destino, recalls that it is precisely an action of confrontation that can create appearance, illusion, or perhaps even the concrete emotion of a spatiotemporal displacement. Architecture, by its very nature an action of confrontation, generates a priori, exerts gravity, imposes its ictus, welcomes the influx—in short (even without wanting to) represents the human condition. And the ephemeral is an integral part of this game.
The extreme category of art and therefore of architecture that opposes the permanent and the lasting, (in truth) can anachronistically possess an intrinsic limited capacity to be exposed to the eternal. It might easily allow itself to affirm that the ephemeral is certain (most certain), while durable–eternal are not only improbable but impossible.

Why is all this ephemeral? It is a reasoning as senseless as believing that everything can last for eternity. Intermediate gradations are gradations and make possible many other technical and technological adventures. Compensating for the self-destructive tendency are the values of solid automatisms that are automatically accepted, and the place is populated by materials that gradually share the pleasure of a life lived and the ambition to be immortal (as, for example, in non-biodegradability and in millennial decay).

On the other hand, it is interesting to draw attention to the analogy with illusion and the marvels that the ephemeral has always generated. Owing to the evanescence of the phenomenon, it is intuitive that everything placed before us (beauty) must last but a short time. To remain incessantly immersed in aesthetic enjoyment would be equivalent (by the rule of contrast) to being directed to the Minos of one of the hells where immersion is equally indecent and unbearable.

Hence the ephemeral permits wayfinding in the maremagnum of the banal and the vulgar, contaminating itself, indeed, even at times through an excess of inutility. Yes, because it is here that the heel or the tile finds its scope, its function, the necessity of the ephemeral role. And rare, in fact, is the case in which the ephemeral is associated with the unrepeatable. For many, however, evanescence remains sovereign. In architecture, all the actions of confrontation that trigger synaesthetic perceptions and relations are particularly effective. These are sensory tensions that can act on the visual (using natural or artificial light) and the extra‑visual (operating on the dematerialised surface, on haptic interactions, but rather rarely on the olfactory, and with the interference or, better still, the valorisation of the sound power of materials).

Even if the synonyms of ephemeral lead one to infer an intrinsic negativity (fragile, fleeting, labile, passing, precarious, transitory, vain), there nonetheless remains evident the positivity of the power of displacement which, in the account in which life is narrated, and by analogy the architectural project, succeeds in bringing into relief the understanding of the fact that life has need of being lived (marvellously).

“The instant is uninhabitable, like the future,” wrote Octavio Paz, but since the butterfly does not count the years but the instants, this brief time of its own is enough for it.

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Now let us ask ourselves whether this idea of time as a decisive factor for the construction of an ephemeral architecture holds true, whether it is the first variable we must address when we begin to think about a Fastand.

We can design grand and magnificent forms only to realise how low and short-lived the expectations of our space are. Our construction systems are designed from the outset to simplify and speed up construction. Discover our systems here.