Architectural Interregnums

Architectural design has always been the laboratory where experimentation with ideas about the newness, and elaboration of forms and spatial arrangements take place towards architectural creations. Prefixes such as post-, de-, re-, neo-, appear as typical signifiers of the spirit of novelty representing the different shifts that shape the history of architecture and could be broadly summarized by the term ‘meta’. Even if ‘meta’ is a kind of ontological reference to newness, implying its definition with what preceded, it always remains polysemic and, for this reason, ambivalent. Design is acting between the existing and the (be)coming, the established and the expected, the familiar and the xenon, the antipathy and the empathy. It is driven by the quest for a ‘meta’, known (or not) that since its appearance, it will lose its newness and will become commonplace. What type of novelty does it put forward through its creations in the contemporary interregnum? What are the primary formal or material traits that can attribute that identity to the new that can clearly distinguish it from the old? The paradox we are confronted with nowadays is that despite the unprecedentedly fast pace of changes happening in the sphere of the intellect, the sciences, technology, and the geopolitics of the globalized world, there are no apparent signs of novelty in contemporary architectural production.