EARTH WATER AIR FIRE

“Whereas in our recent past the paradigm by which architecture was measured was the city, now, the collective reference surrounding our design activity is the relation with nature. Sustainability as an economic but also a moral and political argument is clearly a consensus in our societies. It is a frequently abstract, formless argument with religious overtones (appealing more to faith than to reason), utilizable in political verbalism and which drifts easily towards engineering technocracy. In this context, a vindication of the presence of the four elements (earth, water, air, fire) by means of which the pre-Socratic philosophers envisaged humankind’s relation with nature seems extremely useful to the discipline today. The elements relate us to nature as a physical phenomenon that can be experienced with the senses and is therefore directly connected with architecture, which, as we know, addresses the real construction of the world, the alchemic operation that turns concepts into material. The elements save our activity from the pure mathematic abstraction on which technology is based.