The title of this talk comes from a short text that was presented in New York last November at an architecture conference on globalism. Like so many things that had been conceived, planned, and scheduled for the days immediately post 9.11, this conference too was taken over by this tragedy and steered toward issues which have been lurking in our national conscience for a while but whose urgency not many of us could imagine then. In the case of this conference in New York, because its pre-9.11 theme was globalist to begin with, the true dimensions of what is clearly a global tragedy often seemed to confound the participants struggling to determine a precise space to situate a nationalist sorrow. Like an unexpected and stubborn patina, this confrontation between global rhetoric and national sentiment surfaced everywhere… including in my talk that day.
Tonight I’ll use that talk as an armature to say firstly, a few things about the news from New York; secondly, about architecture’s fundamental yet peculiar capacity to simultaneously reflect and determine social practice in an environment, and, lastly, perhaps I’ll touch a bit on what one has to do with the other.
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