Intro / Nitro: Dinamitando a Vitruvio

Due to its strictly platonic conceptual foundations, Vitruvius’s famous triad “Firmitas, Utilitas, Venustas” has permeated western design culture until our present day. Vitruvius´s statement has undergone multiple rediscoveries and changes of scope within successive historic contexts of actualization of the Greco-Roman cultures, but its core conceptual formulations are still considered fundamentally valid nowadays.

Although the classical notions of Stability, Usefulness and Beauty have proved to be enormously successful so far in their roles of both design tools and validation criteria, this paper argues that they might be approaching a point of critical exhaustion, and thus it may be necessary to enunciate some of their possible actualizations in order to resituate them within the framework of contemporary culture.

Using oppositional criteria, this paper detects and describes various contemporary phenomena involving design -or design practices- that do not comply with the classic notion of the Stable, the Useful or the Beautiful, yet still yield results that can be considered of interest in terms of their resonance with contemporary aesthetics and social sensibilities. Their methodological approaches are then used to sketch three speculative systems of material organization which can potentially serve as the grounds to articulate the respective actualizations of Vitruvius´s Stable, Useful and Beautiful.