All human beings feel architecture. This feeling—a veritable drive—is part of our nature. We are dealing with the same instinct that animals have when they discover their cave or dig their burrow and shelter in them. The same emotion, too, of a bird building its nest. Basically, our DNA seeks out that second skin that we call home. This article, written by someone who is not an architect, is based much more on this human feeling than on a theoretical knowledge of these themes.
The twenty-first century has started with the West in a state of trembling. We cannot quite seem to shake off this tremor. We have become citizens of uncertainty and, in a way, of discouragement. Everything around us, even the most basic, is becoming a problem: demography, economic development, even nature itself. Nothing is certain anymore—not even the sun or the rain of each season.
And, curiously, on this horizon of almost permanent crisis, architectural elements, works of architecture, have been present, as protagonists, in the evolution of events. It all began with the fall of a wall, in Berlin, in 1989. That gave the world a new turn. The tension between the capitalist West and the communist East evaporated, and the planet opened up to new directions.
We might have thought that the West had emerged victorious, but some years later we realized that the sense of history was taking another direction. In the attacks of September 11, 2001, we saw how fragile our standards were. There, again, architecture played a major role: the Twin Towers of New York became the pennants surrendered to the atrocity of terrorism.
Then it is not possible to dissociate the financial crisis that broke out in 2008 from the Manhattan building on Seventh Avenue, home to the offices of Lehman Brothers bank, which gave the edifice its name at the time. Everyone saw bank officials come out of that building, which was like a castle of riches, carrying cardboard boxes that contained their belongings.
On this horizon of almost permanent crisis, works of architecture, have been present, as protagonists, in the evolution of events