The Future is a Journey to the Past: Stories about Sustainability

‘Where does our ability to survive come from? Plants and animals have the same instinct. Nature has created a system, an ecosystem, with marvellous shapes and colours and incredible biodiversity. We have, in part, lost all of this, generating an irreversible change in our planet. The question is whether we can continue to live this way, or whether we should just take what’s good and throw the rest away, so that we can enter a new era.’ – Mario Cucinella

The Future is a Journey to the Past: Stories about Sustainability, an exhibition curated by Mario Cucinella Architects, explores past and present notions of sustainability in order to develop the ecological thinking necessary to bridge the divide between the natural world and human activity – including, of course, architecture.

It comprises three key elements: a timeline tracing the evolution of environmental awareness and activism from prehistory to the present, and speculating on the future; a selection of projects designed by Mario Cucinella Architects that explore these themes through scale models and booklets; as well as a map highlighting the locations of key sites and projects explored in Cucinella's book The Future is a Journey to the Past.

In the exhibition journeys through the past are projected into the future, suggesting a synthesis of traditional and modern thinking in how we approach architecture and the environment. Architectural history, in all its global richness, becomes a relevant source of inspiration to educate us about our sustainable past while providing us with tools to become future guardians of the global environment.