The invention of the present: between criticism of the recent past and environmental urgencies. The Case of Tainan Spring (Tainan, Taiwan, 2020)

Architecture as Built Criticism is one that can lead people to reflect on their own condition as inhabitants of the city and on their own lifestyles, triggering a critical analysis of what has mortified existence, depriving one of the beauty and pleasure of spend time “together”. The case of Tainan Spring (2020), a project by MVRDV, an urban lagoon born on the ruins of an "old" bulky supermarket is an example of how architecture can be the mouthpiece of a critique turned towards an insignificant way of life, against the possibility to recover precious public living spaces for the passing of common time. In Tainan (Taiwan), the ruins of an old shopping mall now appear, as if it were a contemporary Roman Forum... Erasing the past with a single stroke, in place of the shopping center (China-Town Mall, 1983) the MVRDV studio has made space for a public square (Tainan Spring, 2020) in the guise of an urban lagoon full of vegetation and water games for children and adults. The past is one step away, this time overtaken by a present that is as peremptory as it is acute because we preferred to leave the testimony of a hyper-consumed image alive, as a memory for the inhabitants of a recent past against which we can still fight in sight of a rebirth. Now it is no longer the routine of purchases, the repetition of gestures that dominate, but creativity and improvisation, fun and adventure. The resulting degree of beauty is dense and densely animated by memories and at the same time by the “hyper-modern” desire for change within everyone’s reach, at the service of all, capable of confusing even the most trained minds in the culture of fast food and the smallest fashions. It is as if modernity has collapsed in itself, rotated, and then re-emerged naked in a very successful performance of past and present that coexist, “close” but “distant” (a bit like the rules imposed by the current pandemic...) and with the burden of contradictions that the truest modern spirit carries with it, since “to appropriate the modernities of yesterday can be at once a critique of the modernities of today and an act of faith in the modernities - and in the modern men and women - of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow (Marshall Berman).”