New wefts, ancient warps. Origin as a choral tale of distinct architectural languages. The case study of the House of the Faun in Pompeii

We live in an era in which architecture, to use Heidegger’s words, unravels along the “traces of the fledged gods”, a time in which every kind of shared linguistic convention has met its demise (Monestiroli, 2018). Contemporaneity in the “time of the night of the world”, living the crisis as the norm, seems to have stopped questioning itself on the sense and origin of things, lingering instead in the folds and possibilities of a language whose vocabulary over time has been enriched, transformed, hybridized, deformed. Countless new possibilities have been added to the original archetypes and grammatical structures (Purini, 2000). As a result, they have enlarged the language to the point of producing a diaspora, a new Babylon that prevents architecture from being once again a bearer of shared values and in which the “merciless hunt for success makes research increasingly superficial” (Kandinsky, 2005). Architecture is a particular form of language: it does not express, but rather expresses itself (Focillon, 2002). If it is true, on one hand, that a new system of architectural language seems impossible, imposing and anachronistic, on the other hand it is clear that it becomes necessary to the life of the discipline itself. Is it possible today to re – establish a system of conventions able to clean the language from self – referentiality in order to orient it again towards a shared and intelligible story? How can code and canon, words and rules of composition, renew their sense and necessity in the contemporary world? The study aims to demonstrate how their actuality is possible, suggested and verified in a privileged field of investigation that is the relationship with the ancient; here, the project of the new has the honor and the burden of showing the choral tale of two necessarily distinct languages. Therefore, the new constitutes a fundamental moment of knowledge and a tool for researching the reasons of the project (Ferro, 2020). Listening to what has already been said, it is possible to rediscover the linguistic fragments of ancient sounds in the ruins: codes, words, harmonies, proportions, rhythms, compositions, canons lie immanent in the traces of the ancient, waiting to be revealed. The project re – finds, case by case, a system of conventions capable of establishing a specific aedequatio (Teyssot, 1987) in the contemporary translation of language. New words come to life as a transcription of the ancient and establish with it a new whole (Ferro, 2012); like recomposed shards, different fragments of the same vase, ancient and new together become physical witnesses of a superior, original order (Benjiamin, 2012).