Multi-National City: The Problem of Architecture SEMINAR
Reinhold Martin
The seminars, which are based on the recent publication by Reinhold Martin and Kadambari Baxi of /Multi-National City: Architectural Itineraries/ (Actar, 2006), will explore a series of propositions advanced in the book, as follows:
1. A city is never simply in one place.
2. You cannot always see a city.
3. A city is a figment of the imagination that is also a tangible thing.
4. Every building imagines a city, and a world.
5. Every building can imagine another city, and another world.
The “Multi-National City” (MNC) is the city of corporate globalization.
It is a threat, not to architects or to architecture (which thrive in it), but to the architectural /project/. Why? Because the MNC is designed to exclude the possibility of utopian thought. Using the book as a guide, these seminars will develop a “science of the imaginary”
dedicated to confronting this basic, outer limit of the contemporary city. Architecture —and not statistics, diagrams, or maps— will be our unit of analysis. The public lecture will work backwards, from a series of architectural projects to the historical and theoretical problems that they confront.
