Landscape is Architecture in The Coming Dark Age

In the Middle Ages we have already experienced climatic collapses, epidemics and new coexistences between man and the wild. If every future has a past to return to, ours is a Medioevo prossimo venturo (Vacca, 1971). The contribution intends to address how our modernity has its roots here, in a time where everything has to be a project. The landscape in the Middle Ages was as much material for architectural design as the ruins of the cities of the Empire. New cosmologies were born between urban and forest opposed to the clear Roman separation (Gentili, 2020). The first environmental protections (Flick, 2020) and the first ecocides (Bloch, 1926) developed in a relationship of attack and retreat between human and non-human, reminding us that if we are nature, we are also medieval (Coccia, 2020). Architecture became territory in an archipelago of fortifications to administer production and govern small portions in a sea of fallow land and wilderness. As the Empire fell, a self-sufficient regionalism composed of an interconnected point chessboard allowed forms of autonomy composed of castles and monasteries. Arches or spaceships that materialised spatial, territorial, social and organisational forms. It is still in the landscape as a medieval project that monks invented a new economic cosmology on which ours will evolve (Bruni, Smerilli, 2020). To investigate how to thrive in panic yesterday as well as tomorrow, is to hope that these falls (collapsus-collabi) can turn around and become ascents. Like the flight of saints or witches. A collapsing awareness (Servigne, Stevens, 2015) can orient our divination of tomorrow by looking at the constellations formed by superimposing past and future, averting, perhaps, disaster (astrum). Also because, after all, we have never been modern (Lautor, 1991) and global warming, by exasperating our idea of the world, has finally brought us out of our all-too-human cocoon. So here’s to the so-called end of the world! (Morton, 2013) No one can guarantee that beyond the abyss there is a New World, no one can guarantee the opposite. The end of the world is only tomorrow’s world (Meschiari, 2021).