We are at the threshold of something, but do not know what exactly. Ortega y Gasset’s diagnosis – “We do not know what is happening to us, and this is precisely what is happening to us” – also applies to the current moment of transition between decades, as full of uncertainty in a world devoid of leadership as in a Spain fractured by ideological and territorial conflicts. AV was born 35 years ago to take stock of architecture and its context, and in this role of global observer the ‘Yearbooks’ have been indispensable. If we look at the immediate past, the titles of the introductory essays in the last five years sum up the narrative: after announcing ‘the coming gale’ and confirming a ‘change of climate,’ we deplored ‘the rise of populism’ and described the new ‘territories of risk,’ to end up witnessing ‘the multitude in motion,’ which called the established order into question through protests. Francis Fukuyama has written in Identity that ‘sometime in the middle of the second decade of the twenty-first century, world politics changed dramatically,’ and we may still be trying to define the profiles of that mutation, and straining our eyes to more clearly distinguish the future waiting at our threshold...
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