foundation has taken the form of historicism, which means that the rationality of reality is
presented as the rational progress of events. Once it is no longer possible to speak of a
rational progress of events because it is no longer possible to speak of progress (we are
no longer imperial thinkers), then rationality as Begrundung (grounding) and as the
substantial reality of that which is, is no longer given. What I mean to say, without
insisting on further schematic philosophical detail, is that the ‘simultaneitization’ of
reality in the contemporary world is, almost inevitably, also a ‘simulacrization’. That
which becomes simultaneous also becomes ‘simulacral’, in the sense that it concerns
appearances that cannot be referred back to a basic rationality, to a true world—according
to an expression Nietzsche uses in an aphorism from Twighlight of the Idols—since there
is no longer the single thread of rationality that was found in historicism, and which
served as the law of history.
In his Zur Seinsfrage (The Question of Being) Heidegger writes the word Sein with a
cross through it. Clearly, it was not a way of writing the word Sein in order to mean
something else. Instead, it seems to me that this way of writing ‘being’ should be
interpreted as having more or less the same meaning as the doch of the ‘yet poetically
man/Dwells...’. Alternatively, perhaps it should be seen from the point of view of that
which I have just described as ‘simulacrization’, or reality’s turning into a simulacrum. In
other words in our present historical condition, we are witnessing a manifestation of
being marked by disappearance, by becoming lighter, less cogent, less definite. Will the
processing of the world into information not also serve to open a way of being of things
in which it is no longer a simple matter to tell reality from the fictions of the imagination?
In the end, what do we know of reality? Ours is a world where the channels by which our
experience of reality is mediated have become increasingly explicit. To be sure, one can
say that in medieval times the experience of external reality was mediated. For example,
it was by the preacher, the priest, that people who spent almost their entire lives in a tiny
village were told of the history of the world, But then the mediation was not visible: there
was a form of mediation sufficiently unitary to blend with reality almost without trace.
Today, the ‘simulacrization’ of reality is a combined effect of invention, innovation in
information technology and a loss of centrality in the vision of history. It is not a case of
saying that only today is the information we have of the world mediated; perhaps it has
always been so. But in the past, in the time when mediation did not occur in situations of
conflict between images of the world, it was not visible. We live in a situation where the
mediation has become visible by virtue of the proliferation of perspectives with, say,
social and political origins that make it difficult to identify the image with reality about
which, in turn, one no longer knows anything directly. We know only that if we want to
produce an image of the world, we have to collect many different images. Yet even this
does not absolutely guarantee that we shall be in a position to see the world as it ‘truly’
is, only that we shall no longer be conditioned by a single image, a single interpretation.
This is the framework within which, with particular attention to the theme of
architecture, I shall try to redescribe the activity of the project.
Does planning a project in these conditions—those I have summarized with the notion
of ‘poetic dwelling’—open a way of being that is more free or less free? I don’t know.
But the task posed is to find legitimations for the project that no longer appeal to ‘strong’,
natural, or even historical structures. For example, one can no longer say that there is a
golden number, an ideal measure that can be used in the construction of buildings or the
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