Regaining the culture of cities

When, as architects, we reflect on the relationship between architectural projects, cities and landscape, we must keep the urban degradation of the world we live in uppermost in our thoughts. Nowadays we live in a state of crisis, and this fact casts doubt on a series of values closely tied to professional and teaching activities. Understood as a tool for the building of top quality public spaces and ever better places and landscapes to live in, architecture is obscured by an increasingly common desire to impress. However, we must hold fast and seek to start afresh from the meaning of an architectural project, analysing case by case, each and every time, enquiring into the needs and potential a specific place expresses in nuce and revisiting all the specific features of the local area, culture and history. To respond adequately in the right tone, what is needed is silence, calm, care and the chance to rethink things and return to places, to assess even the smallest, often latent signs which are there, hidden in the landscape. A landscape which is not simply what we see but also a combination of our points of view on what is around us, a sign of our perspective on things and our idea of how we would like them to be. There is a fifth dimension of the space in which we live: the culture of cities, the culture of the landscape. And from this fifth dimension we must start again, regaining the culture and history of sites and cities.