Involuntary Prisoners of Architecture
2003; The MIT Press; Volume: 106; Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/016228703322791034
ISSN1536-013X
Autores Tópico(s)Architecture, Modernity, and Design
ResumoThe recent swell of public discourse on contemporary architecture seems to have taken the discipline somewhat by surprise; the unremitting scrutiny and visibility cast upon it on account of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation (LMDC) competition for the World Trade Center site was met by an uncanny (or disquieting) silence of ideas.1 Following a tragic and traumatic violat ion of Manhattan—“Capital of the Twentieth Century” and long-standing site of modernist and experimental fantasies, even of retroactive manifestoes—the architectural vanguard was called on to fulfill public aspirations that were, for most, distinctly out of sync with contemporary concerns.2 It was interpolated into roles such as enhancing the symbolic legibility of the skyline, ameliorating a sense of loss or tragedy, and engaging social and political processes in order that rebuilding be debated in terms beyond the bureaucratic and financial. The discipline was thus also confronted by the embatt led st atus of it s role within the ongoing (post)modernization of the city.3 Most of the architects, like those to whom they
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