If Archaeology may be considered, in a certain sense, as both a scientia and a conscientia of finitude, or of processes and dynamics unveiled in the study of finitude—as an excavation of memories embedded within landscapes—Architecture, conversely (and ultimately), is a creative art that initiates and contributes to establishing, or reiterating, complex relations, including those of domination. Architecture as technical art (ars)—tectonics, properly speaking—numbers among humanity's most ancient forms of knowledge, a skill likewise observed in other animal species that construct elaborate structures. We thus understand that tectonics, in the broadest sense, is not exclusively human: other beings build.
What characterises our species, however, is the variety of built forms and the refinement of structural technique that have rendered possible humanity's survival and expansion on Earth. And beyond it. The greatest constructed human artefact, the expressive and transformative result of designing and building upon a given territory since its remote origins—always within the domain of architectural knowledge—the City thus demonstrates, in the present epoch, the consolidation of the urban phenomenon—or rather, of urban habitat, properly speaking—through the reproduction of this physical mode of collective dwelling which, since ancestral times and across diverse cultures and geographies, has transcended the limits and rhythms of village life.
At the dawn of the twenty-first century, when for the first time in history the majority of the world's population resides in cities, this tendency towards the urban reveals itself in stark relief: towards urbanised territories, towards the formation of vast urban zones assuming the tentacular form of interconnected networks of technical infrastructure and a profusion of vertical accents—tall buildings concentrating inhabitants upon such artificial spaces. Significant vectors consolidate, driving this diffuse dynamic, expanding urban landscapes whose magnitudes and complexities of interrelations and interactions (economic, social, environmental, and so forth) impact the so-called biosphere on a global scale.
Architecture, considered within the urban realm and the contemporary (re)production of cities, demands a fundamental rethinking of its praxis—to transcend, this time, all that is predatory within it, towards the environment and towards beings, the visible violences that mark the Anthropocene, an epoch of ruin production. No longer should architecture be subjugated by spectacular imperatives that amplify the ambivalence of landscape's creative/destructive transformation. In harnessing contemporary technological potentialities, we might relearn from ancient knowledge, as still transmitted amongst indigenous peoples, wherein finitude and transcendence are regarded in a certain manner, and wherein the ancient Vitruvian concept of firmitas—which presupposes permanence—might be reiterated as the immanence of an architecture propitious and promising to life as a whole, beyond the human and the individual, within its ephemeral dimension.
Silvio Luiz Cordeiro