In 2005, more than ever, architecture is annihilating places, banalizing them, violating them. Sometimes it replaces the landscape, creates it in its own image, which is nothing but another way of effacing it. At a time when we rush across the world faster and faster, when we listen to and watch the same global networks, share feelings about the same disasters, when we dance to the same hits, watch the same matches, when they flood us with the same films, in which the star is global, when the president of one country wants to rule the world, when we shop in cloned shopping centers, work behind the same eternal curtain walls÷and when whatever good might come of this forms no part of global priorities÷the global economy is accentuating the effects of the dominant architecture, the type that claims Îwe don't need context.' And yet debate on this galloping frenzy does not exist: architectural criticism, invoking the limits of the discipline, is content with aesthetic and stylistic reflections devoid of any analysis of the real, and ignores the crucial historical clash that--more insistently every day--sets a global architecture against an architecture of situations, generic architecture against an architecture of specificity. So says the international architecture star Jean Nouvel in his manifesto, published here in 12 languages, along with images of his recently completed Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.
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