That summer day in 1977 the plane circled Washington D.C. for almost two hours above the too-crowded National airport, so I arrived half an hour late to lunch at The White House. I was ushered swiftly into the dining room where about 20 people were already seated. The book I was carrying disappeared from my […]
In a design studio I was teaching in 1980, I was not surprised by the skeptical faces of the critics I had invited to my students’ final presentation. I was expecting this, because the assignment I had given them was for a new Parliament House in Canberra, Australia, a huge building with a complex program […]
The women seated in the New York townhouse’s basement theater that winter afternoon of 1983 were craning their necks to catch a glimpse of Donald Trump’s reactions to my presentation. The gathering’s purpose was to interest potential donors in financing the partial renovation of an original Columbia University building for the Department of Art History […]
“The acrobat is no puppet, he devotes his life to activities, in which, in perpetual danger of death, he performs extraordinary movements of infinite difficulty, with disciplined exactitude and precision… free to break his neck and bones be crushed. Nobody asks him to do this. Nobody owes him any thanks. He lives in the extraordinary […]
I am the first architect in my family. I spent my childhood in a small village in the Argentine pampas where there were no architects; the first stimulus to become one did not originate in the observation of building but of nature. Everyone in my village knew the inseparable little girls (my cousin and I, […]
DWELLING AS MANIFESTO
06.08.2021