The code of Utopia. Fragments of necessary in the art of the possible

In this paper, I ask some questions about writing and/or transcribing the relationship between architecture and the environment, meaning the latter in its social and cultural complexity. Specifically, I want to reflect on the contribution of the architectural discipline - understood as an expressive activity - in the construction of a cultural scenario and an urban imaginary. And to do this, I think it useful to ask myself about the causes that define an idea of the city and a way of living, and even if the role of architectural production is to pursue or to design. That is: is it necessary to preserve the eighteenth-century conquest, which perhaps was accidental, about an autonomy of the architectural discipline or, today more than ever, must it be accepted that these ideas and ways are and will be only the result of a series of historical and casual concatenations and contingencies? Throughout history, the answers to these questions have been expressed in literature, philosophy and the visual arts in general, through architectural and urban narratives and images that we recognize as 'utopian': for this reason I believe it is necessary to address these issues within the utopia code, in which, from time to time, a precise organizational concept of political, economic, moral and social systems, and two precise ideas, on the use of science and technique - and then of technology - and on the relationship between man and reality - or nature, have defined the visions and representations of the appropriate environment for a specific culture and progress. Well, as result of the delegitimization processes of universal knowledge and of the conception of the architect as ‘intellectual’, after the uncertainties and existential dramas that modernity has revealed, this contribution attempts to recognize that absurdly the architectural discipline has acquired over time greater strength and right - as well as duty - in the development of new scenarios and in the construction of new ideas. In the contradictions of the relationships between city and architecture, between chance, destiny and project, between expression and communication, between public and private interests and finally in the complicated relationship of knowledge with concepts such as nature and technique, we inherit from history the ideal field of action of architecture: the world of forms. The only thing it takes.