"IT'S ALL A GAME"
Reuse the Tower Competition
Once someone sang «da tempo e mare non si impara niente».
Time left an unrecognizable, useless, shapeless stump of the old tower. Sea and salt rounded off its corners, wore away its stone, spoiled its volumes. The wind did the rest.
What remains, that meaning-less truncated pyramid, is the result of the longest, slowest game between time, sea and stone.
Whatever the original state of things, the game deleted it, and wind blew its rules away.
What is certain is that there was a game, it’s still going on, and we have no control on the current match. We’re not allowed to interfere with it: to rebuild, to integrate, to close and conclude, by any architectural gesture we’d put an end to the match.
Neither we can presumptuously throw into it new players, new materials.
What we can do is to keep playing the game, with the same players, but with new rules, rules that we know.
We can give the gamers a new way to play. Time adds up to time, slowly or fast; water adds up to the sea, turbid or clear; stone adds up to stone.
That’s the crowning of the crippled tower: a new set of rules for a new game; new edges for the time to age, new faces for the sun to blaze, new openings for the wind to rush through.
The tower opens and closes up, it seems almost to move: light passes and changes through two faces and a corner; the echo of the waves howls on each stone with different voice; two corners stay closed, to provide shelter from roaring nature, or just a safe place to witness the game.
Come to the new old tower, come in: it’s alive, maybe it’s changed, but it’s always the same, stone and time, wind and sea; learn nothing, just come in and play.
Come to the new old tower, come in: it’s alive, maybe it’s changed, but it’s always the same, stone and time, wind and sea; learn nothing, just come in and play.
