How We Narrate Our Yesterday Determines How We Imagine the Future of Architecture

Delivered at MIT in April 2021, this lecture develops the argument that the stories a culture holds about its past are the primary material architects work with — whether they acknowledge this or not. An architect who does not read the narrative already present in a place is not working from a neutral position; they are simply working from someone else's story, usually the dominant one. The lecture argues that the discipline has consistently mistaken this borrowed narrative for universality, and that the most urgent task in architecture today is learning to read that narrative before touching the site. A full essay developing this argument is forthcoming.