Rinascente

Architecture has often used the ruin or its metaphor to question the discipline itself. Even though they are distant in time, both architects (Kahn, Superstudio, Isozaki, Palladio, Piranesi…) and artists (Gordon Matta Clark, Richard Serra) have found exactly in the reincarnation of the ruin their own thought, managing to capture the creative force of the ruin, whether it is a naked architecture or a pure form. In other words, ‘form and non-form’. The architecture of the ruin is also non-architecture, being an architectural element that can be defined even by its negation.

With Monumento Contínuo, Superstudio idealises the ruin that questions contemporaneity. The Continuous Monument is nothing more than a representation of ruin or non-ruin. A mute architecture that has no access and no interior, no façade and the exterior is just a volume with a grid of squares. The anti-modern, anti-consumerist object is the image of a ruin. The continuous monument critically confronts the contemporary world by closing all the doors and windows to the outside. The ruin also critically confronts the world and undertakes a path of reconstruction of the old by theorising forms and uses, where the architecture of the continuous monument can be defined as conceptual practice, while the ruins are theoretical and logical practice.

Radical groups can declare the end of architecture as an instrument of political alienation and as a system of representation, while the ruin represents itself. The continuous monument is an ‘architectural model of total urbanisation’ where the figurative dimension of architecture is annihilated by the grid, which is a cartographic model that can be assimilated to the grids that map the excavation areas. On the surface, the grid covers the entire ground and, in doing so, the notion of scale and dimension disappears.

The Continuous Monument seems hostile to man, while the ruin is a natural shelter.
G.B. Piranesi, in his views from around three centuries ago, performs an operation of synthesis between ruins. The primary elements of the new architecture are human beings, intrinsically linked to the objects within the engraving, and the observer as a figure outside the engraving. All of them elements for his inventions.

Through the past, we consecrate ourselves and the world we build.

Salvatore Settis, in his book ‘The Future of the Classical’, writes: ‘[…] The intermittent and periodic recourse to the forms of the classical, both to understand the past and as a function of the present, which we see staged in a hundred variations since Greek culture itself consecrated itself by promoting the cult of the past…’.