Every time the question of ornament arises, it indicates a fundamental structural change which is therefore seen as a crisis and a major upheaval in culture. It is precisely in times of radical cultural change that the question of ornament resurfaces, such as for example at the beginning the 20th century with the transition from production by hand to production by machine, or in the second half of the 20th century with the transition to the structural and post-structural processes of postmodernism. Today too, on the cusp of the change from the mechanical to the digital age, the talk is of the “revival of ornament”. This leads us to the thesis that the crisis of ornament is the “expression of a consciousness of the crisis in modernism” (Raulet 1993,10) which is simultaneously one of its constituent characteristics. Modernism hones its conceptual orientation on ornament: this is where its reconceptualization in the changing cultural force field occurs. Ornament is where minds divide, but less in the sense of taste than as the point where the central theoretical questions of the period crystallise: ornament is the battlefield of theory.

„Dass zwischen der Welt der modernen Technik und der archaischen Symbolwelt der Mythologie Korrespondenzen spielen, kann nur der gedankenlose Betrachter leugnen“1, schrieb Walter Benjamin im Passagen-Werk. Die Moderne sei keineswegs geschichtslos. Sie sei auf der Suche nach der Urgeschichte, nach dem urgeschichtlichen Index ihrer eigenen avancierten Praxis. Wo sie sich gegen das Veraltete – das heißt: gegen das Jüngstvergangene – abzusetzen versuche, synkopiere in ihr eine Dialektik des Neuesten mit dem Vorvergangenen. Dies zeigt sich für Benjamin besonders in der Architektur. Weil im allgemeinen flüchtig, das heißt optisch-unbewusst rezipiert, sei sie kollektives Wunsch- und Traumbild der jeweiligen Epoche. Benjamin wollte seine These vom urgeschichtlichen Index der Moderne an der materiellen
Kultur des 19. Jahrhunderts, an Paris und seiner Architektur, seinen
Passagen, Eisenkonstruktionen und Interieurs aufzeigen.

Toyo Ito è un transfrontaliero e, da oltre 30 anni, inaugura incessantemente e sempre con "leggerezza" nuovi territori per l'architettura. Qualche anno fa, a torto e in maniera eccessivamente frettolosa, qualcuno ha cercato di "bollarlo" come tecno-futurista, concentrandosi troppo sugli aspetti formali della sua architettura. Al contrario, la sua arte si distingue per essere in costante evoluzione e per dare visibilità allo spirito del tempo. Se si volesse, comunque, cercare una definizione per la sua opera, gli aggettivi più pertinenti sarebbero "inondata d'aria e pervasa di luce", caratteristiche ricorrenti in tutti le sue costruzioni nelle loro diverse forme: in tal senso, l'edificio Silver Hut (1984) è costituito da una struttura leggerissima che sembra

Sulla teoria del design Secondo un motto di spirito, la teoria dell'arte, per gli artisti, ha il medesimo valore dell'ornitologia per gli uccelli. Dobbiamo dedurne che il suo significato è uguale a zero, visto che gli uccelli, tanto più se variopinti, non hanno bisogno di queste nozioni per godersi la vita, anche perché non ne capirebbero nulla. Ora, proprio tra designer, architetti e artisti, gli uccelli variopinti abbondano ma, diversamente dal mondo animale, sono proprio i più colorati tra loro a cercare continuamente di spiegare con la teoria il loro comportamento. Anche se non lo fanno pubblicamente, per loro la teoria esercita una funzione importante nel processo di design: infatti, vanno alla ricerca del nesso nascosto tra le cose, di ciò che le determina al di là del confine tra visibile e invisibile e si sottrae, così, all'osservazione diretta. Design

Peter Eisenman is the Icarus of post-avant-garde architecture and has numerous highly regarded, controversial built structures to his name - such as the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin and the Ciudad de la Cultura de Galicia in Santiago de Compostela. How to eliminate what one becomes - this is one way of summarizing one of the most decisive features of Eisenman's architectural praxis: the disappearance of the author. Displaying his disdain for individual style in the arts, Eisenman regularly threw Michel Foucault's question "what is an author?" into debates on architecture. However, the death of the author - "la mort de l'auteur"1 first proposed by Roland Barthes - was not an end in itself for Eisenman. For it is only the follow-up question "what is critique?"2 that illuminates the role of the elimination of the author in the negativity aesthetics of Eisenman's architectural praxis: it is the dialectics of the critique...

In recent years informality has been defined and re-defined in the context of urban development. Evolving from initially being understood as a 'sector' of the economy to currently being redefined as a 'new way of life', 'informality' has become a rather ambiguous term. According to our understanding, many of the current concepts of informality do not capture the complexity and importance of connectivity between sectors, levels, and actors. In particular, they neglect the importance of power relations and the blurriness of constantly negotiated and readjusted boundaries between the acceptable and the non-acceptable, legal and non-legal. In this article, we question the usefulness of the term 'informality' and instead propose a set of parameters in order to describe negotiation processes inherent to the term 'informality'. We suggest a model that tries to avoid the ambiguity of the informality debate. It offers a tool to understand the typically composite pattern of actors and their interplay regarding the three dimensions: power, legitimacy, and resources.