Ethics, Resilience and Legacy. Some observations on the concept of territory defined by Saverio Muratori

This paper aims to analyze the ethical and aesthetic structures present in the concept of territory defined by Muratori, highlighting its legacy and modernity. The notion of territory, as expressed in the volume “Architettura e Civiltà in Crisi” and the subsequent “Civiltà e Territorio” anticipate an entire season of theoretical architecture (think of Gregotti and Rossi), outlining concepts that over time will become topical issues. We refer to the “civil crisis” as a “crisis of judgment”, to the “moral and critical judgment” towards history and to the territory understood as an “earth-man symbiotic process” analyzed and enhanced in its aesthetic as well as productive and ethical values. Almost sixty years after, it is necessary to highlight the centrality that these issues – although not always recognized – have in scientific research: terms such as recycling, reuse, entropy, sustainability do not have their own autonomy if not inserted within an organic understanding of the productive and economic dimension of the territory. In recent years, precisely as a response to the widely diffused green sensitivity, many designers have tried to put the concept of “ethical metamorphosis” of the territory at the centre of the landscape project. It is therefore timely to consider Muratori’s ethical conception of the territory in the light of new design attitudes, such as those of the Turenscape studio, which are part of a practice of architecture that seeks to integrate the morphology with massive interventions, typical of a hyper-dense city, with the most current environmental needs of this last urban season.