You can go back and look at different historical periods, at least in the 20th century, and
architecture has had a greater social role or greater sort of cultural role at different
points, right?
And the sort of caricature of the story is that, you know, there was a period when there
was a huge amount of government investment in architecture in the 40s and the 50s until
some of the problems of that became clear in the 60s, and there were theories of urban
planning that were very ambitious, right?
There was a lot of, there were sort of very totalizing projects that remade huge chunks
of cities, you know, really large-scale projects, I mean, I'm from Boston, Boston is one of
the cities that underwent a huge amount of urban renewal and New York is the same.
And there were a lot of failures that came out of that because I think there was the
sense that there was almost too much power to do things with too much trust invested
in the architect.
And so there was a certain backlash that happened in both ways, that happened, first of all,
in the part of institutions that were supporting architecture, the government, you know, there
was a sort of general cultural reaction that architects and planners had been given license
to reshape society in very fundamental ways and that they had, they hadn't done very well
with those opportunities.
On the other hand, I think it's maybe even more, it's as much or more an internal problem
of the discipline that architects got very scared and took themselves increasingly sort
of away from society after that out of a fear of sort of what they had wrought, and it led
to a whole series of practices that were, you know, people talk about paper architecture,
which was a whole set of sort of very theoretical production and very conceptual production that
was not even, not even so much about producing real buildings.
It was about shifting how people were defining architecture into all sorts of practices that
were, had nothing to do with the production of buildings.
And that kind of very intense self-doubt and questioning of the roots of architecture,
the very principles that architecture was based on.
I think that followed directly, you know, one period followed directly from the other.
And for me, you know, one of the undercurrents of it, one of the reasons that happened was
a sense of, you know, maybe the role of the architect for a while isn't to take on larger
social problems, it's to become very self-reflexive and to look at ourselves and look at our discipline,
right?
So this, in my opinion, totally divorced from any larger sorts of social questions.
So architects did a fairly good job of taking themselves out of things that had become really
problematic.
And now there are a lot of people that I think are worried that sort of architects can't
find their way back in.
