Location: EUR, Italy
Date: 2021
Programme: Urban planning
Client: N/A
Status: N/A
Area: N/A
Budget: N/A
Team: Traumnovelle (architects)
ISOLATION
They were expecting that it would have happened during the night. It happened one morning at the beginning of the year. They were all gone. Looking from a distance, it seemed that they always knew what would come and that that programmed end was the only purpose of their achievements. Cities, monuments but also the landscapes where designed for this world to come. All of those were also the reason why, and now they were all gone. They would never know if it had been avoidable. As an expression of their most extreme fear and the celebration of this time to come, cities were still standing, ghosts of their world.
DOMESTIC
REAL
Would Oedipus have killed his father and married his mother if the oracle hadn’t announced it to his parents before he was born? Would their world have been destroyed by the calm fury of their environment if they hadn’t thought, since the first days of their civilisations, that the end would come? By changing the courses of rivers, modifying climates and slaughtering all living beings, they tried to create the conditions of their own survival but by doing so created the situation in which they killed their mother and lost their father. All their actions turn back to them one thousand times harder. What was at first a river transformed into a tsunami. What was a step in front their house transformed into an earthquake. What was the energy required to bring light exploded into pure shadows. They consumed themselves as a fire does it. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.
VIRTUAL
INEQUALITIES
In a world of abundance, they invented scarcity as way to dominate all possible others. Giving a price to air, water, land. They even invented a currency for virtual concepts, souls, culture, pleasure, entertainment. Every brick that they assembled was done with this sole purpose to dominate, to control, to destroy. They invented buildings to watch the light, techniques to be able to breath. Greenhouses replaced destroyed forests and created artificial ones that they thought they were controlling. The world was their project. None of them were born or died equals. Equality itself was an artificial concept that had been invented to justify new acts of inequality.
COMMUNICATION
CARE
In the midst of their collapse they had a short time of intelligence. They started to realize that it was too late, like the smoker who tries to quit when the doctor tells him that this time it will really be their last cigarette. All the pleasure of this guilty act was to pretend that every one of them was the last. Was humanity looking for some kind of redemption by trying to not smoke this last cigarette? Wasn’t it obvious that, from the very first inhale it was already too late, and that they should instead at least enjoy their last cigarette? The end is precisely this time during which it is too late to care. None of their sustainable buildings or artificial salads could have reversed centuries of guilty pleasures. Had they even wanted to appear in their cleanest tuxedo for the last wedding, they had all of their culture, all of their architecture, all of their cities surrounding them and showing their real actions. And that all those guilty pleasures created for eternity would outlive them. It was, for sure, way too late to care and even if they had tried, they wouldn’t have known how to do it.
CONTEXT
COMMUNITY
To realise that their world would end was the realisation of their own finitude. They tried to inscribe the memory of their short journey on every piece of marble, every stone, every mountain. They created gigantic pyramids, tentaculos cities, monuments to eternity, rockets, new species. They modified all possible beings as a way of not being forgotten. From the earth on which you will walk to the falling stars, you will know that humanity was here. Each new generation was unable to understand the symbols left by the former and had to start again, each time with more power and more desperation. Each building from their past was another grave, another testimony to their end. Trees, rocks, beings and non-beings stood next to them unheard and subjected to humanity’s madness. If only they knew that the answer was simply to stop trying to be gods. That there is none one to communicate with in their future because they destroyed all possibility of a future.
LEGACY
