I sometimes wonder whether I should write more. What has been said by an architect in the last twenty years that has a substance on the level of Venturi or Rossi’s texts? Rem’s contributions are more comments on what’s happening, not a single text or study that leads somewhere, that be proposing or advocating what we should do...

A Work in Mutation

If you see what is in the pipeline, you can see the dramatic changes in outlook that are taking place, arising from our increased experience, the technology of computers –which has given us new tools –, and the new understanding that comes from working in different geographies and circumstances. The fact that we have to be understood in different cultures somehow cancels the more innocent way we have been working so far. Whatever we have done in Switzerland, or in Europe, is modernist, a product of the Enlightenment. It was supposed to follow a tradition of research, innovation and dialogue. How can we reconcile this with the economic and political forces emerging after the fall of Communism? Russia or China are huge markets, and these countries have been dictatorships, they have a totally different history. I doubt the innocence we have worked with so far can be maintained: dialogue must be replaced by something else. Dialogue will not disappear, because dialogue is the key word for the evolution of our own work, but we may have it only on the drawing boards or with a network of intellectual accomplices, no longer with the client, the public or the outside... [+]