Issue 12 of MD Journal aims to reflect on the relationship between a stone artefact and time. Post-consumer society has linked its way of relating to “things” to their actual consumption. Stone material, through its historical dimension of the art and architecture, leads us to a new reflection related with durability. In this regard, quoting Tommaso D’Acquino, George Kubler recalls the notion of aevum to indicate the intermediate duration between the finite time and the eternity of human souls and other celestial beings, which is adaptable, in his words, “to describe the duration of many artefacts, so durable that their existence precedes that of any creature who lives on earth today and so indestructible that, as far as we know, they can be expected to last almost indefinitely”. If we bring this definition back to the palimpsest of artefacts, architecture and the city, we can make a connection relating to the way in which the time, as slowly lays the rocky layers and lends unique mechanical and aesthetic qualities to stone, inexorably changes the expression of their aesthetic value. If it is true, as Benjamin argued, that the evolution of technical means puts into effect a change in the symbolic expression of the work of art, also in relation to a set of gestures renewed by new skills, the stone artefact allows precise evolutionary sequences to be encoded, which are rendered explicit from an analogue context to a digital one. Similarly, technique and technology are the means and the support of change: from the first tips of flint to engraved writing, from the chisels guided by the hand of the craftsman to today’s “virtuous machines”, the intrinsic qualities of stone continue to be revealed, configuring the history of places and of the specific material culture. If we assume the perspective of sustainability, stone suggest as new topics in the light of “non-renewability”, with reference to the source of extraction, “re-usability”, with reference to the gentrification of existing ruined architectures, “re-composition” with reference to the current research on material design related to the composite materials from waste. The reasons of this change are addressed by the call being made to scholars of design and architecture to draft articles that propose the results of their theoretical and design research, investigating the cultural, technical, scientific and social reasons, which reflect the image of the stone project in different scales and with different values.
Below are possible topics to be related to stone systems, focusing on “permanence” and “change” meanings: the landscape and the contemporary city in the scale of the building and the urban space; the monument and its relationship with memory and the surrounding museum setting; the functional artefact and the object of use; design methodology and instrumental technical dimension, analogue vs. digital; cultural vs. environmental sustainability: from the quality of the project for durability to the material recomposed from processing waste; surfaces and transfers of memory; stone narrations, from inscriptions to lithography.