I understand completely the need to challenge people’s assumptions about how they want to live. Consumer culture is one of those received wisdoms that requires challenging. Oddly, we are in a current condition where those cultural norms are producing great instabilities. Yet I can’t help feel that a destabilizing element is our loss of connection to history. One of the things that often gives your work the power is the juxtaposition with the known. I think of scenes with conventional furniture, section cuts through familiar building sections, but with unfamiliar interventions. It puts us into a condition where we can question accepted norms. But there is also a kind of eternal return here: the original fabric, which someone figure out how to live in, is then occupied again with another vision of space (yours), which someone else now needs to figure out how to live in. It would be fun to figure out how to move in with my “old furniture.” We also have Borromini’s St. Ivo, reached through an anonymous courtyard that seems to bulge and warp – made powerful by that contrast with the older fabric. Thus past and potential coexist in uneasy simultaneity. Saarinen gives us that quiet background into which a Berlin free zone can be inserted.

There is a fascism embodied in the complete mega work. While I generally support the concept of the completed vision, I also have reservations. There is a totalitarianism – the Egyptian pyramid, a Greek temple, Zaha’s work for BMW – a despotic control in service of dominant power regimes.Do we need that abuse to give us beauty? Are we doomed to versions of culture like, as Harry Lime (Orson Wells), in “The Third Man” says: “in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love – they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.” ?