L’ipocrisia dell’efficienza

The hypocrisy of efficiency: The mediating synthesis by Ficino and the dialectic contrast given with the arrival of romantic and late romantic thought, the assumption, already ratified by the Scriptures, of the dichotomy between the concept of Man as part of the creation and as ruler of the creation, justifies that the anthropization process, from the minimum settling cell, the house, to the territorial scale, is an invasive process towards Nature, although necessarily invasive, at great expense of the absorbing, alleviating and adapting capability of the planet. The acceleration of this process, proportional with the demographic growth and the dislocation of the technological process, has been drawn in the past a linear law. Since about sixty years, that is when the certainties of man completely overturn and phenomena linked to the globalization arise, this acceleration followed an exponential law. The resulting, inevitable acceleration of technology has unexpected results: from the technological mysticism to the loss of the primal aim of technology, that should be Man; from the rewriting of parameters of efficiency and effectiveness, significantly oversized in comparison to human needs, to the introduction, even by political means, of goals related to sustainable development and biodiversity. Behaviours such as these are remedial, and they nowadays appear more and more forcefully, bringing in all of their conflicting implications: the connection with parameters including social fairness, liveableness and feasibility, and assumptions, including reduction of pollution, waste and harmful substances, that make in fact contradictory the applicability of these theories. Due to the impossibility, almost axiomatic, of not intruding Nature, it is necessary to go back to the primal meaning of technology and its etymologic reference to art and artifice. Even in terms of architecture, the so-called "small scale", the interior scale, there is contradiction between objects that are as technologically advanced as useless, on the one hand, and objects that hypocritically flaunt a naturalist spirit, from which it is clear not only how mankind is gradually losing knowledge of nature and the ability to relate to it (and, at the same time, to quality life), but also an effort to save nature itself, through the aberrant use of a technology that is disposed at a very high price.