From the uniform scenarios of an international panorama grown tired of spectacular performances with foreseen and foreseeable results, we are witnessing the emergence of local realities favoured by geographic, cultural and socio-political contexts where architecture is allowed to play its due role: that of interpreter of the specific conditions of locations, of a geography, that is at the same time able, to convey, through a conscious alteration of the landscape, the deepest thoughts and attitudes associated with the activity of building. One must look to these experiences with admiration and new attention because even if it is true that architecture is an extraordinary instrument of communication, it is equally true that the latter has prevailed on the disciplinary contents, mistaking – as often happens – the means for the end.
From this point of view the best Norwegian architectural production, true to orientations and traditions that have remained constant throughout the Twentieth century, has in recent year achieved, even in the simplest and most contained cases, an exemplary coherence in expressing intents and intentions that in their turn bear witness to a shared knowledge and “feeling” of which architecture becomes an appropriate spokesman. Moreover, if an inherent ability to harmonize past and present - combined with an extraordinary vocation to celebrate the power and beauty of the landscape with rigour and simplicity – form the foundations of this discreet, confident and conscious approach, the unity and unique relationship between history and nature certainly represents the most important contribution of a wide range of works, of which a magazine issue can only provide a partial even if fascinating cross-section. As the editors of the issue have correctly stressed, it is a matter of an anything but casual research representing the most concrete and advanced results of a cultural strategy which has clearly not been late in bearing fruits. But if we are to grasp some non-dogmatic truth – a scientific necessity – it must concern the physical condition of the matter, of its truth and hence its beauty. I believe that architecture is beyond any reason and that its space is a consequence of a complex and magical process of fluctuation and uncertainty, guided by intuitive logics dictated by processes of transformation of the matter. And building with elements in stone and concrete presupposes an indissoluble bond between Matter, Structure and Space where the load-bearing elements outline the space, becoming its expression. By the same effort, the usual act and on the basis of the same idea.
The encounter between Space, Structure and Matter (if we put the elements in this new sequence the result naturally changes) is the most up-to-date way to see architecture. To give an inhabitable space a form on the basis of this sequence calls for a mechanic and thermodynamic equilibrium. And to build with earth is equivalent to attempting to understand the principle which the history of science has handed down to us: to break the chain of the matter, causing a reaction and ordering it in a new structure, to create a space. It is pure physics. It requires a lot of energy and thus a great effort. Architecture is this entropic process.
