The project of the real. Six writings, one sense on the perpetual crisis of architectural and social conditions

The new century began with an economic crisis and environmentaland health catastrophes, and is projecting us into a new complexdimension of our living in which we are witnessing a fundamentalparadigm shift, not only in our understanding of the present, butof the future in particular. We can no longer use methods and systems belonging to the scientific and reductionist paradigm of therecent past, because we are currently in a new and different condition, in an ongoing search for ethical and social relations. Thescientific paradigm in which everything was decomposed and thenreorganized according to a universal principle of knowledge, orthe reduction of complexity into simplicity, is currently no longerapplicable to knowledge in general, to living the Earth, and evenless so to architecture. The disjunctive logic of Cartesian analytical theory, which distinguishes and separates and decontextualizes, used by such masters of the past century as Le Corbusier, Miesvan der Rohe, and Aldo Rossi,