A Timely Text

Substitute "architecture" for any number of contemporary "professions" - but let us begin with journalism, or the teaching of history - and we find embedded here a message about the machine, mass reproduction, and a diurnal search for the authentic. Wright is considering the machine: in 1910, an enigmatic and ambiguous form. Today that machine is the digital sea of information; and our struggle is to find the new "plastic" forms that evolve from this most networked of machines, and are generative, rather than objects that "repurpose" the old. Just as Wright contrasts the craft of the Middle Ages with what he reads as the inauthenticity of the "Renaissance" so we are left to contrast the twentieth century world of books, newspapers, arts and crafts, and visceral art, with the virtual future. Wright is in search of a soul; we, I suspect, will make do with some kind of "trust".

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