Almost 25 years after publishing her first book, L’architetto fuori di sé (1982), and more than 35 years since her first questions around self-awareness, Marta Lonzi uses a key word in the feminist lexicon, Authenticity, as a litmus test to reread the history of architecture in search of ethical connotations. Her book, Autenticità e progetto, is a wide-ranging investigative process moving from the concept of authenticity to its manifestation in practice, which now affects the whole social body.

Today, the architect is stuck at a stage where he is at one with what he develops. Having allowed the subjective and therefore conscious relation between himself and the object to decline, he resides immanent in the project he presents in objective terms, believing them illusorily to be true. This tautological spiral of design leads to the decline of the process and, therefore, of the object: no longer architecture, but cubature; no longer cities with a human dimension, but periphery, meaning soulless agglomerations; no longer territorial integrity, but fracture. (…) The awareness of one’s own creative act modifies the setting of one’s own action, because it generates in the designer an awareness of the value of life with respect to the work, of authenticity with respect to the illusion of immortality, directing the architect towards a more conscious creativity, where what is at stake is no longer the object but oneself as the subject that devises it, at a higher stage of knowledge.

Marta Lonzi (trans. Richard Sadler)