Reading them now it is impossible to escape the magnitude of the ambition, the enormous optimism in the potential and power of architecture. 100 years have passed since the manifestos of Corbusier, Marinetti and Loos. Urgent, clear, decisive, necessary… a foundation, forever embedded within my own sensibility.
But finally blind to the realities of the uncertain, the unknowable, the ambiguous. (We are so less sure of ourselves.) Highly articulated multiplicities have replaced universal singularities… all that is specific, idiosyncratic.
Today the impulse for the radical is private, covert, more tactical… nuanced to the political circumstance. One has to be clever.
Originally published in ICON magazine
Issue 404 | 2007
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