Beyond the SymboIs
Anything goes, say 'the doers. “Main Street is almost all right,” says Venturi,the architect.“Nothing works any more,” say those who suffer from the hostility of our day and age.These statements stand for contradictory opinions, if not for contradictory facts.We get used to living With contradictions and there are several reason for this: traditions crumble, and with them cultural identities. No one seems really to understand and control the dynamics developed by economics and politics. Everything merges into everything else, and mass communication creates an artificial world of signs.Arbitrariness prevails.Postmodern life could be described as a state in which everything beyond our own personal biography seems vague, blurred, and somehow unreal.The World is full of signs and information,which stand for things that no one fully understands because they, too, turn out to be mere signs for other things.Yet the real thing remains hidden. No one ever gets to see it. Nevertheless, l am convinced that real things do exist, however endangered they may be.There are earth and water the light of the sun, landscapes and vegetation and there are objects, made by man,such as machines,tools, or musical instruments, which are what they are Which are not mere vehicles for an artistic message, and whose presence is self-evident