Text from Architetti.com

It’s a misunderstanding, really. It’s a misunderstanding to believe that things last very long. Very long in relation to the time we dedicate to experiencing them. It’s an act of respect and mutual understanding to consider the perceptual condition or behavioral experience relatively. That is, to realize how architecture in its various spatial and temporal forms, being par excellence a four-dimensional art (impure, but still an art), allows us to share rhythm, acceleration, stillness, escape. As in a flow of sounds, forms, colors, materials appear, sometimes magically even rules and meanings (but it’s rare, very rare!) because it’s precisely one of the primary functions of architecture that activates: that of making appear, almost to the point of materializing it, the question of why we are here and now, while we would like to live in another moment and elsewhere (which is also an important category of space).

[…] Rosario Assunto, in 1957 in Forma e destino, reminds us that it’s precisely an act of confrontation that can create the appearance, the illusion, or perhaps even the concrete emotion of a spatial-temporal dislocation. Architecture by its nature provides the act of confrontation, generates friction, exerts gravity, imposes collision, helps the trigger, in short (even unwillingly) represents the human condition. And the ephemeral is an integral part of this game.
An extreme category of art and therefore also of architecture, it opposes the permanent and the lasting, which (in truth) anachronistically possess an intrinsic limited capacity to expose themselves to the eternal. One could easily admit that ephemeral is certain (very certain) while lasting–eternal are not only improbable but impossible.

So is everything ephemeral? It’s a reasoning just as senseless as believing that everything can last for eternity. Intermediate gradations are welcome and make many technical and technological adventures possible. By compensating for self-destructive tendencies, absolute values are created that are mathematically acceptable and the place is populated with materials that gradually share the pleasure of a moment of lived life and the ambition to be immortal (for example in non-biodegradability and millennial decay).

Differently, it’s interesting to focus attention on the analogy with illusion and wonder that the ephemeral has always generated. Precisely because of the evanescence of the phenomenon, it’s intuitive that everything that brings pleasure (and beauty) has little time to last. Remaining incessantly immersed in aesthetic enjoyment would be equivalent (by Dante’s law of contrapasso) to being directed by Minos to one of the circles of hell where immersion is equally indecent and unbearable.

So the ephemeral allows wayfinding in the chaos of the banal and vulgar, contaminating itself, alas, sometimes too by excess of uselessness. Yes, because then here’s where the tile or brick falls! On the purpose, function, necessity of the ephemeral role. It’s rare, in fact, that the ephemeral is associated with the indispensable. As with many perfumes, evanescence reigns supreme. In architecture, all acts of confrontation that trigger perceptions or synesthetic relationships are particularly effective. They are sensory intersections that can act on the visual (using both natural and artificial light) and on the extra-visual (operating on the dematerializing surface, on haptic interactions, more rarely olfactory and with the interference or better yet the enhancement of the sonic power of materials).

Even if the synonyms of ephemeral lead to inducing an intrinsic negativity (fragile, fleeting, labile, passing, precarious, provisional, transitory, vain), the positivity of the power of displacement remains undeniably evident, which, in the narrative through which life unfolds, and by analogy the architectural project, manages to highlight the understanding that life needs to be lived (wonderfully).

“The instant is uninhabitable like the future” wrote Octavio Paz, but given that the butterfly doesn’t count the years but the instants, this brief time is enough for it.

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Now let’s ask ourselves how this idea of time as a decisive factor for building an ephemeral and DIY architecture is the first variable we must address when we start thinking about a Fastand.

We can design grand and magnificent forms only to realize how the time factor significantly lowers the expectations of our space to be set up. Our construction systems are designed from the outset to simplify and speed up construction. Discover our systems HERE