Various, consolidated
I have a specific memory that I return to when I want to understand what architectural certainty looks like from the inside. It is not from Florence. It is from Vienna, in the 1850s, watching the planners of the Ringstrasse explain to each other why their design for the city would define the 20th century. They were so confident. The confidence was not ignorance: these were intelligent, informed people who had studied history and drawn what they believed were the correct conclusions from it.
Sixty years later Vienna was the capital of a collapsed empire. The Ringstrasse remained, beautiful and irrelevant to the catastrophe that had overrun it.
I have watched this from closer or further away in every century I have moved through. The Holy Roman Empire. The Ottoman courts at their zenith, when Constantinople was the center of the known world and its continuation seemed as certain as the continuation of the sun. Victorian London, so confident in its mission to organize the planet along rational principles that it could not perceive the contradiction at the center of the mission. The great 20th century ideological systems, each convinced it had solved the human problem permanently.
None of them were stupid. All of them were wrong about permanence. The error is not intellectual. It is architectural. They built monuments to permanence while standing on shifting sand, and the shifting sand did what it always does: it shifted. The geometry is predictable. It has always been predictable. I am making an album about its predictability. May 22.