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As long as the Colosseum stands / Rome will stand; But when the Colosseum falls / Rome, too, will fall. And when Rome has fallen / Then the whole world will fall with it.ssss1 (Du Cange 1678, p. 407, translated)

According to this association of the notions of durée and dureté, the survival of a form over time results from the continued existence of the initial material object, if only in the form of ruins or traces. This assimilation of physical solidity with the capacity to last over time (durability), or even with the capacity to ensure the perennity of a societal choice, is at the heart of current debates on the subject of resilience; the approach is at odds with the notion of engineering resilience, where the response to natural disasters is found in the physical resistance of infrastructures (ssss1).

In the early 20th century, certain authors observed that the survival of forms in a landscape also relies on adjustments, whereby the original material forms are adapted to new functions. For example, it was noted that the ground footprint of medieval ramparts, later demolished, could still be seen in the curvature of urban thoroughfares (Brunhes 1925; Lavedan 1926a; Unwin 1981; Rossi 2001). P. Lavedan, writing during the period of reconstruction which followed the First World War, noted that towns or cities destroyed by a violent event (fire, war, etc.) grew back “naturally” following their earlier layout. Lavedan considered this phenomenon to be the result of a “natural inclination”, whereby “an owner will spontaneously rebuild his dwelling where it was before”. Once again, continuity appears as the result of memory and of uninterrupted ownership. Furthermore, in cases where destruction and reconstruction are separated by a longer period, “experience shows that […] in many cases, if even traces of a house remained, it will be rebuilt in the same place”ssss1 (Lavedan 1926a, pp. 92–93). Material continuity thus takes the place of memory. For Lavedan, permanence was the rule, while the creation of something new was the exception. The “natural inclination” of the owning masses, spontaneously rebuilding their homes in the same locations, thus corresponds to Saussure’s “speaking masses”.