Year Domini 2519.

There was a time when people built massive buildings made by concrete, glass and steel. And that housed banks, museums, working and meeting places.

About 500 years ago, in what is now called the "Archistar period", the beautiful country was split in two: there was the school of conservatism, which sacralized every historic building and banned its manipulation, reuse, transformation. And the avant-garde one, who spoke the "contemporary" language and was inclined to dialogue with the ancient, placing itself however in a position of detachment from it.

Projecting at that time, it is easy to understand its fears, anxieties, caution, ambitions. The past had, in this sense, a specific weight that would cloud the minds and the collective imagination, "condemning" Architecture to a present and an image of the future inextricably intertwined with its "illustrious" past.

Nature and history teach us that we are Homo Prospectus and "the main function of our mind is to imagine the future", wrote Martin E.P. Seligman and John Tierney. To do so, however, man must detach himself from his past, from his life, from his habits.

The city is not ours. We didn't build it. It has been given to us, given by our ancestors, by the people of the past. A precious heirloom to be treated with respect and reverence, but which inevitably has to deal with the ways of living of "today", whatever it may be. And this comparison can have multiple implications and variations, dreams and intentions. Just think of avant-garde conceptual works and ideological innovation of that time, visions with different formal declinations such as the nonconformity of the Louvre in Paris, the perseverance of the Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, the triumphal rendering of the Colosseum in Rome. They showed courage and risked failure, now they are history.