Each building is a depository. It is a box to store his collection
of banal objects and hoarded reflections. In it, his people
and places are protected a little longer from the erosion of
time.
Despite the nostalgic catharsis offered through design, thoughts
of people, places, and objects invade Ettore’s tranquility
and generate new doubts. He vulnerably states:
The
pitiable winds of nostalgia permeate those areas of light
and shade in the very air that envelopes the earth, and perhaps
in our night-time reflections, those twilight hours that nourish
our dreams and the tangible silences that come with the dusk.
At such times we sense not the dark wind of fear but the infinite
words of nostalgia, an unbearable nostalgia for everything
that we have failed to understand and for all those opportunities
we have missed in the past, and all that continues to elude
us now.20
This
uncertainty provoked by nostalgia challenges Ettore to continually
redefine ethical design. Every answer in a design resolution leads
to an additional three questions.
