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a prophecy because when you said that, it
was thirty or forty years ago, but this is the
problem now!
RM: It’s true that once the expression and
the description of what architecture thinks
about how it should proceed is in the hands
of historians, you need to tell historians that
the narrative they have followed is no longer
valuable for explaining.
KF: That’s the problem. And you feel it. You
feel it when you talk to students. There’s this
gap. I try to cover the gap but it’s not easy.
RM: It has also to do with this respect or
attempt to give the word ‘continuity’ a posi-
tive meaning instead of a bad one, in this case
following the hints given by the place itself,
by the reading of how this piece of land had
been 200 years before… I still believe that you
have to be careful about wasting…
KF: There’s this funny figure, an Argentin-
ian Marxist, who had a big impact on me. He
says somewhere (maybe Tomás Maldonado
quoted him) that you can’t make anything
without waste, this is distinguishable from
ideology of waste. It’s an amazing statement.
And this is really what we are facing.
RM: You always need to build. Building
is an act of force that always means leaving
something damaged somehow: no doubt about
it. Besides, it’s impossible to repeat things. It’s
impossible not to move. The more you know
about architectural history, the more you real-
ize how rapidly changes happen. It seems like
a long period of time for evolving a type, and
yet you have an alert eye. You see changes
every year. But new architects are unable to
go through this scheme of strict repetition.
KF: For the young generation, the whole
question, for instance, of security of employ-
ment, is no longer so evident. There is no sta-
bility. The opposite, society is very unstable.
And this is why I, however pathetic, think
in terms of resistance. Not in the sense that
one shouldn’t change, but in the sense that
architecture still has that potential to give to
human beings, in their own short life, some
kind of ground. Otherwise there is no ground.
Somehow here there is an ethical question.
RM: Even though we don’t know what the
true expression of the Zeitgeist is nowadays, it
is difficult to believe that what we do is outside
what society wants done. From this point of
view, it is not difficult to understand what the
world will build. But this doesn’t mean that
you shouldn’t accept that what is happening
probably reflects, whether we like it or not,
what is happening in the world as a whole.
KF: But I think somewhere there is this
issue of class, because in a way you could
say that the project of the Enlightenment is a
middle-class project. And you could also say
that the belief in democracy is also a middle-
class thing. And when the middle class is
eliminated, or suppressed, or when you don’t
produce a middle class, you can’t have democ-
racy anymore. This is the kind of situation we
are in because all this money that is going to
the top of the pyramid is also part of a move-
ment that means to destroy the middle class.
That is the danger of the moment.
RM: It seems that today the middle class is
almost destroyed, and yet that means that the
new proletarians have been taxed on many of
the most valuable things culture and history
has produced… You have to admit that never
before did people have such a sense of fulfil-
ment, of arriving at valuable things of life...
KF: The paradox is that when you begin to
commodify, though, like everything, then the
value desired starts to fall as something desir-
able. This is a funny kind of strange enigma.
“Building is an act of force
that always means leaving
something damaged”
