Arquitectura

Variations on Alberti's famous dictum "A house is like a small city and the city is like a big house" have been enunciated over the last decades to support architectural approaches that attempt to tackle identity issues in mass construction. In the aftermath of World War II an ethnological approach was favored as means to deliver an outcome that considered, as Alberti did, the human scale and the notion of community as key references for the work of the architect and urban planner. Then, the emergence of the welfare state and the challenges it brought about created the backdrop for this approach. Today, it is the unbalanced growth of the developing economies and the decline of the former core of the economic world system that shape the scenario where new challenges on the relation between architecture and cultural identity emerge.