Statement 71

We continually move in and out of the borders of modernity, mostly without hardly ever knowing it. In what way is my modernity yours? In what way is the generic of modernity – the modernity that without apparent agency builds my so-called subjectivity as an impersonal subject, actually mine? In what way am I a victim of its operations or can I ever be aware, even remotely, of its ‘theoretical’ operations? No one really knows the answers or even what a ‘fully modern’ person really is. Only in architecture is there a pretty good idea (and not for the better). There are those who work with steel and glass, as if modernism has arrived and is more or less a finished thing, available everywhere - globally. There are those, on the other hand, who champion the so-called vernacular (a rather awkward word from the 1970s that pointed to buildings without authors) or revel in ‘tradition.’ Books on “Traditional Architecture of (the name of a country)” multiply. But survivals and revivals interblend to such an extreme that it is impossible to see even any of this as an outside of ‘modernity.’ Any attempt to come up with a definition is absurd. It is all situational.