The cultural functionality of architecture should not be regarded as fundamental. Architecture is by far the most cumbersome and inert of all cultural expression techniques. Its production is bound to material, time, and social negotiation; it resists acceleration. Yet precisely this resistance has turned against it. In an age of ever-faster content consumption and the erosion of stable symbolic values, it is no longer surprising that architecture per se is losing substance. The accelerated circulation of meaning, the fragmentation of collective values, and the shortening of attention spans have all contributed to a condition in which architecture, once a medium of durable cultural articulation, is increasingly displaced by the immediacy of more fluid, immaterial forms of cultural production.
It would be misleading, however, to attribute this impoverishment to architecture itself. The discipline has not become poorer in its technical or conceptual capacities; rather, the cultural environment surrounding it has become too volatile to sustain architectural meaning in the long term. Where no shared cultural narratives exist, architecture cannot function on semantic levels. It can only respond pragmatically. The building, deprived of cultural consensus, withdraws into performance — into infrastructure, shell, logistics, and technology.
This transformation should not be moralized, for it reflects the wider condition of a society that no longer maintains a stable interpretive horizon. When every sign is instantly replaceable, the built environment becomes transient in meaning as well. Architecture ceases to be a bearer of cultural content and regresses to its most fundamental role: the provision of spatial order and protection. From a marginal perspective, one might say that architecture, once the most concrete expression of shared ideals, is reverting to its pre-cultural state — a technology for solving purely spatial problems, a modern cave providing shelter without symbolic aspiration.
Yet even this regression offers insight. It reminds us that the durability of architectural meaning has never been a property of form alone, but of the social and cultural systems capable of sustaining it. If architecture today risks becoming mere logistics, this says less about its own expressive limits than about our collective incapacity to endow it with meaning that endures beyond the next cycle of consumption.
Luigi Monzo 