_“I sought the future and past catastrophe of the social in geology, in that upturning of depth that can be seen in the striated spaces, the reliefs of salt and stone, the canyons where the fossil river flows down, the immemorial abyss of slowness that shows itself in the erosion and geology.
I even looked for it in the verticality of the metropolises.”_
Jean Baudrillard
Olivo Barbieri tells the story of mountains as designed architecture, where the risk and limit of sustainability is the same as what prompted Baudrillardʼs prescient observation as far back as 1986. According to Barbieri, “seascapes, great waterfalls, mountains, and old city centers have become fragile theme parks. Entertainment has virtually replaced the sublime. The veduta genre of megalopolises may, by dimension and consideration, compete with nature for importance in the collective imagination. The Dolomites are symbolic forms in movement whose history began two hundred and fifty million years ago. Their component material came from oceanic abysses and recalls the latterʼs design, almost an upsidedown history of the earth.”