The role of magazines, specialist publishers and exhibitions, the relations between the media and architecture, architecture as a means of communication, and consequently the space, function, duties and objectives of criticism: these are all questions that can be debated endlessly, raising many problems that pertain to very different spheres. What caused, from this perspective, the catastrophe of the Twin Towers? I cannot tell, especially in a still unfolding situation whose outcome is not predictable. Today it is possible to witness these things live, so that the thoughts of yesterday are mixed up and confused with the sensations and reflections prompted by the events taking place in these hours.

So I will try to express my point of view with brief statements that reflect different and fragmentary aspects of criticism. Among these, consideration of one’s own work, the emotion and the pleasure of the aesthetic and creative experience, the relationship with society and with the world as it appears to us.

CRITICALLY CORRECT

The practice of architecture is a thoroughly positive activity that, in all its manifestations, cannot help but express a constructive, edifying intent. At its deepest core, architecture contains a promise of happiness, and the vision of a better world. If the world imagined by architects has to contain at least the hint of a utopian impulse, critics of architecture find themselves in the delicate position of someone who wants to take a toy apart without breaking it, of someone who wants to turn over the cards without spoiling the game.

Critics who do not wish to confine themselves to the mere function of providing information or an activity that verges on publicity, inevitably end up skating on the thin ice of paradox.On the other hand the marginal character of our role is plain: architects, unlike artists, have no need of critics. The success of a drawing, building or urban development scheme does not depend on the approval of the initiated, but on that of the clients and end users.

Diary of a Day in SeptemberWith the terrifying images of the attack on the Twin Towers still burned into my retina, I visited Norman Foster’s ‘Great Court at the British Museum’ and the major exhibition of his projects. Great mastery, a perfect grasp of technique, a triumph of English hi-tech grandeur’. To me it looked like the triumph of ‘single-track thinking’, a demonstration of how the dominant economic and political power finds its most conscious and mature expression in the world.

There is no room for doubt, uncertainty, ambiguity; there is no corner left in shade in the Great Court, no point in the perfect structure of the glazed vault left unresolved. I found it an assertive and overbearing vision of the world, which can only divide public opinion: the majority approves and applauds, but a minority will see this display of power as a populist gesture rather than a democratic one, as an unacceptable simplification, a glorification of the current state of the world and society.

In the afternoon I crossed the Thames and, walking through the dreary scenery of the South Bank, arrived at the Tate Modern of Jacques Herzog and Pierre De Meuron. Suddenly, turning into a side street that runs between abandoned warehouses, workshops and small postmodernist condominiums already in a state of decay, I was confronted by the charm of Dieter Kienast’s garden, bounded by the dark brick wall of the power station.

The museum has a very different look from the new court of the British Museum; the tone is democratic but not populist and, notwithstanding the monumental dimensions of the Turbine Hall, no attempt is made to surprise you with special effects. The space is cool and welcoming; it is a theatre created for an experience that the visitor is invited to share. Genoa, Lagos, New York, Kabul. Architecture of FearReporting on the contemporary city of mutations leads us to dispense with our usual parameters and attribute other contents, other associations, other images to the concept of ‘city’.

The broadcasts of the events in Genoa (July 21 and 22) and Manhattan (September 11) have shifted the terms of reference even further forward. The new city is no longer – or not just – Lagos, the edge cities of America or the concentration of the Pearl River Delta, but the traditional city transformed by violence, its values and symbols undermined.In Genoa I saw the historic centre, usually an extraordinary and lively Mediterranean casbah, fenced off and deserted.

The seafront bordered by a double row of containers. The city’s main shopping street fortified and used as a parking lot for the cars of government delegations. The Palasport (designed by Luigi Carlo Daneri and Pier Luigi Nervi) turned into the ‘citadel of the state police’. The ancient port (redesigned by Renzo Piano) dedicated to the international press. Militarized areas, ghettos that shattered the idea of the city as a concatenation of fluid, permeable, public spaces.On television, since September 11, we have seen downtown Manhattan transformed into an off-limits area, entire streets turned into memorials to the victims, the Giants’ football stadium used as a cathedral to stage an interracial and interreligious funeral rite.

The spaces have changed their sense and significance, accumulating unpredictable memories. They have been assailed by feelings and fears that are uncharted or that people thought had been forgotten forever.In Genoa as in Lagos, in New York as in Haifa and, probably, Kabul, violence has become the principal subject in urban transformation, with an effectiveness in bringing about change that is incomparably greater than that of any planning scheme. Some of these phenomena are temporary, but there can be no doubt that they will leave deep and indelible scars in all our minds.

At this moment the city is once again becoming a place of public space, understood not just as the setting for social interaction, leisure and shopping, but as a theatre tragically steeped in the violence of the world. As in a Grand Guignol-verité, blood, death, collapsing buildings, looting and destruction have found their perfect backdrop in the city. If these are the most recent changes in the field of architecture, the role of criticism remains the same: seeking to discover and understand in order to produce narrations that, in all humility, can go on nourishing the roots of desire.

Alessandro Rocca is an architect, writer and editor of Lotus.