Out of the context: “The treachery of images”

Nowadays, architecture does no longer emerge from a particular place, the image of an architecture of place (and time) being gradually removed. Within the context of (architectural) globalization where borders established by cultures and geopolitics are being removed, distinctive elements are needed to add value and character to one zone or another, thus helping the preservation of its identity.

The contemporary city, seen as a historical layered urban tissue with a certain structure and continuity, seems to evaporate under the pressure of modern architecture attachment towards objects (production); the new city, in its present form of evolution becomes nothing more than a gathering of dispersed individualistic objects.

Maybe it is the time when architecture should (re)learn to be subordinated to the town’s history, and that every new intervention should call against the starchitecture, seen as a gift to advertising, publicity and image consumption. In the spirit of continuing constructing, the new projects should stress out the continuity and the interpretation of the valuable urban tissue and not the building individuality emphasis. Escaping the landmarks composed city, would allow the (re)creation of a homogeneous urban tissue that would actually sustain the public spaces and structures. By exploiting the historical and geographical traces values, the new architecture projects could speak about the city’s temporal dimension, though without reproducing the forms of the past.

The quest for elements like context identity and memory, could lead to an architecture that is able to integrate within a certain place, and when the limits between site and building would have been dissolved, architecture will be able to communicate the simplicity of just being within that place.