Italy needs architecture!

The world needs Architecture!

 Giovannangelo de Angelis

The “Premio Ischia Internazionale di Architettura” (Ischia International Architecture Prize) is born out of the cooperation between the Register of Architects, planners, landscape architects and conservation workers of Naples and its Province, the ANGiA (Italy’s national Association of young architects, planners, landscape architects and conservation workers) and the ANAB (Italian Sustainable Architecture Association). After the great success obtained by the last edition, the national event now goes international, the event is now going international, embracing the American Institute of Architects, the most important institution of the sector in the United States. The main goal of this prize is to highlight the role and responsibility taken in by architecture and architects in the process of landscape transformation and creation of development policies. A process from which society could draw high benefits on an environmental, social and economic level, but which over the last decades has – on the contrary – led in Italy to environmental degradation and cultural impoverishment. The fierce abuse against the natural environment now demands from architecture a trend reversal, a “cultural revolution” starting from the balance between natural environment and built environment for a transformation of the territory having among its principles the “Beauty of Nature”, the “Beauty of Art”, the “Beauty of Technology”. Today as in the past, architecture has the task to define the identity of places and spaces of a society undergoing a continuous development, but also to face a deeply changed scenario; it has to favor the cultural and civic growth of the citizen but also retain its ability to trigger emotions.

Over the last decades, the tourism industry has been the main responsible for the devastation of extremely beautiful natural environments all over the planet. And architecture has been the hand enacting this devastation. On the other side, tourism industry and architecture for tourism have also brought about a huge democratization in travelling, allowing increasingly wider layers of the population to admire places once reserved to a narrow élite.