The fifth dimension of architecture

Relations between design and architecture, city and landscape are strongly associated with our role and mission as architects against the degradation of our living sites. In recent years we are somewhat powerlessly witnessing the progressive loss of importance of the role of Architecture (and of architects). Considered a tool to build high quality public spaces and places, besides better living landscapes, Architecture is blurred by the widespread intention to create spectacular effects, which produce and seemingly originate self-referral images devoid of both content and soul. We must resist the progress of such distortion in an attempt to recommence from the underlying sense of the architectural project by revisiting, for each case, all the specific traits of the land, its culture and history. Each time we must do our best to further define the landscape. We are accustomed to a three-dimensional spatial idea of the world we live in, namely width, length and height. We can then consider the fourth dimension, time. But perhaps there is also a fifth dimension of space, namely urban culture and landscape. This dimension is hard to measure and quantify but, perhaps, it is the most typical of humans because it is a matter of memory, history and stratification. And, this is why it is a matter of landscape.