The Fifth Decade

This fifth decade is the first of this new century, and simultaneously of a new Millennium according to the calendar in practice for most of us. The turn of Millennium is always a very specific time for people: it could be understood as a key point, a point of irreversibility between past and future, but also it is mainly understood as a “new era” giving the opportunity to create new situations and for the members of IASS new Shell and Spatial Structures. It will be the appropriate time for developments that did not occur before. Men are always in between the past, their roots, and the future, their projects. These aspects are reflected in the titles of our symposia and specifically in the titles of the last symposium of the second Millennium [1], and the first symposium of the present one [2]. Looking to this fifth decade is difficult since this is precisely the present time, this is not exactly a work of history, it is not yet a work of project, but all the published documents that are available are very useful for achieving this work, and mainly among them, the Journal of our International Association for Shell and Spatial Structures.