Non-places do no existe.
There exists a non-memory, there exists the fear of what we do not understand, there exists the terror of our memories and therefore of possible futures.
There exists a conformism that confuses the contemporary with the current.
So we spend years dealing with surrogates of truth; it is convenient and easy.
But deadly.
The conformist looks at reality as a spectator.
He/she thinks he/she is not guilty of the crimes of which he/she is the protagonist.
Current architecture is imbued with conformism, and the concealment of the truth is its more widespread practice.
The truth is the city.
The truth is that the city has a soul.
This soul is eternal and ever changing. It is immortal and ephemeral.
Architecture has to “create soul”.
It has to renew the soul of the city. Architecture has to go deep. It has to see more than to watch. It has to reflect, like the brain and the mirror. The soul is in the memory, in the happiness and sorrow of the memory.
(“trieste and a woman”).
The soul is in the eyes. Like enigmas.
The enigma of fear: for over a century, from Simmel to Benjamin all the way to Virilio, we have read the city as a place of barbarism and fear, which are no longer outside the walls, in the darkness of nature, but are across the street, in the house across the road, visible from the window on to the courtyard.
The only way to overcome fear is the exact opposite of the idea of architecture and urban planning as exact sciences, of buildings and cities as machines. If the architecture that we love and practise is a physical and sensual body, the city that we adore is the soul of that body.