L’eterno Moderno: teorie, prassi e conflitti nella tutela dell’architettura del XX secolo / The eternal Modern: theoretical tensions and critical issues in the conservation of twentieth-century architecture

Abstract

The conservation of twentieth-century architecture, particularly the Modern Movement, faces profound theoretical challenges that remain largely unresolved. This is because modern culture, rooted in the ideal of a functional, abstract, and atemporal aesthetic, tends to programmatically reject the marks of time, such as patina and subsequent stratification. This creates a fundamental theoretical tension when applying established conservation doctrines to these buildings. This paper’s central concept, the “eternal modern”, critically examines the aspiration for formal and functional immutability in this architecture. Unlike historical monuments that embrace their own layered history, modern artifacts often resist aging, viewing materic decay and alteration as flaws to be eliminated. This inability to accept decadence, coupled with an excess of visual documentation and a cultural resistance to adaptive reuse, highlights the epistemological limitations of current conservation practices. The paper argues that modern artifacts should not be seen as crystallized objects, but as a dynamic, living heritage requiring a theoretical update based on more flexible, interpretative, and context-sensitive conservation strategies.