Building on the already built

The extent of settlement in the landscape is so extensive that it becomes necessary for us to stop and reconsider the current situation.
Even if every intervention realized so far had embodied a reconsideration of the territory, already so deeply affected by man’s interests and needs, builders in the future will more and more clearly be building on the already built.
On the one hand, the critical and methodological instruments acquired and refined in the course of time might permit us, if mindfully employed, to resume the thread of the speech with the structures which have gradually grown in the course of centuries by successive stratifications, to find that linguistic and operative continuity which seems to be lost.
On the other hand, our action will have to develop a second level of greater complexity. It is in fact necessary to adopt a more refined, analogous and coherent critical-operative system which may permit us to verify how much of the recently built is compatible with the different territories and how much of it should be the object of strategic interventions. In this case parts might be substituted or inserted again as part of a wider process of reconsideration of the territory.