Placemaking After A Pandemic
In a fictitious dialogue with Siegfrid Gideion, the famed Finnish architect Alvar Aalto said, “God created paper for architecture to be drawn on. Everything else is- at least to me- a misuse of paper.” In Aalto’s fictitious dialogue, he presents a prognosis of architecture as he foresaw it in the 1950s: “The horoscope of architecture today is one in which the words are negative- it does not make nice reading.” I, too, intend to read the horoscope of 21st-century architecture in a post-pandemic world from my own cultural and philosophical point of view. The picture I present of our time will not probably please everyone, but it coincides with the pronouncements with many cultural philosophers even before Covid-19 has struck us. This pandemic merely accelerated our continuous transition of mindless consumption as I present in this essay, it does not fundamentally change anything. The Death of Architecture Victor Hugo appended an enigmatic paragraph to the eighth edition of Notre Dame de Paris called “ceci tuera cela”(this will kill that); pronouncing the death of architecture. “In …