The Money Speech

I came to love philosophy because I read Ayn Rand and she presented me with a view of the world that was both coherent and secular, exciting and rational and interesting and intelligent. Although I have come to reject most of what Ayn Rand stands for philosophcially (I think that she misinterprets most philosophers which she tries to do away with), I am still a devotee of some of her ideas and writing.

The below is one such example. This speech, which seeks to overturn the trendy colloquial criticism that "money is the root of all evil", is, I think, an example of the type of thinking which philosophers and all intellectuals should be doing. In modern American society it has become chic to think that "capitalism is bad", "the media is manipulating us" and so forth, but, except for in a very few cases, I feel as though there is little substance behind these criticisms. To say that "money is evil" has become like saying "god bless you" when somebody sneezes - the meaning has been lost, it's just what you do in polite company.

Also, even though Rand's stark philosophy which builds from rational egoism to an objectivist world is certainly not a helpful philosophcial position, I am still entranced with the position in which she places men in the world. For Rand, human beings are the driving force behind "progress" and "innovation" and their places in the world should not be forgotten or forgiven. In the money speech, she places men firmly where they should go: as the rulers of money, not vice versa. Have people with money caused evil? Yes. But so have people without money. Evil and money are not inherently linked, money is an inanimate object which requires the uses and intentions of men to make it what it is.

___________________________________


"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears not all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor—your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money, Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions—and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made—before it can be looted or mooched—made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.'

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss—the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery—that you must offer them values, not wounds—that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best that your money can find. And when men live by trade—with reason, not force, as their final arbiter—it is the best product that wins, the best performance, the man of best judgment and highest ability—and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality—the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants: money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth—the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one, would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve the mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money—and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another—their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich—will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt—and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the men of the double standard—the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money—the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law—men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims—then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion—when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing—when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors—when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you—when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice—you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that is does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it bounces, marked, 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world? You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood—money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, whose names changed, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves—slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer, Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers—as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money—and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being—the self-made man—the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose—because it contains all the others—the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money.' No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity—to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted of obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide— as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns—or dollars. Take your choice—there is no other—and your time is running out."

My Favorite Sub Shop

A week or so ago John Lehderoff of the Rocky Mountain News published "Denver's Greatest Subs" but left out my favorite: Fontano's. I know, I know, it shouldn't be that big of a deal, but these subs are REALLY good. So I wrote John this:

"I was sorry that your recent article on the best subs in Denver overlooked one of my all-time favorite places: Fontano's Chicago Subs. I frequent the one downtown, on 16th and California, and usually get the 8" roast beef with lots of their awesome hot peppers. However, their hot beef and tuna are also a couple winning subs I've tried. I've turned my entire office into Fontano's fans and I definitely think that they deserve to be included."

He wrote back:

"So many sub shops, so little time. After I had eaten at my 30th sub shop, I still had a long list of shops including Fontano's across the Denver metro area that I wished I could've visited. I will pass along your suggestion to my readers. Thanks,
JOhn"

And then this appeared in the Rocky Mountain News on May 14:

A few great shops were left out of my recent search for Denver's best sub sandwiches, according to numerous News readers. I'm happy to pass along their recommendations. After recently tasting nearly 100 subs, you'll have to pardon me if I don't sample any more sandwiches for a few months.

• "I recommend Pat's Philly Steaks and Subs. They roast turkeys every night to prepare the PJ Goblet, a sub stuffed with turkey, homemade dressing and cranberry sauce. Also good: Philly Steaks."

• "I love Pat's. The Italian is my favorite. They add spices and an Italian dressing that make me want to take off my clothes and roll around in it. My fiancé has (the jaw-joint disorder) TMJ, so I can't hear myself think when he eats a Pat's sub. It sounds like machine-gun fire."

• "I was sorry that your recent article overlooked one of my all-time favorite places: Fontano's Chicago Subs. I usually get the 8-inch roast beef with lots of their awesome hot peppers. However, their hot beef and tuna are also winning subs."

• "How could you forget Fontano's Chicago Subs? It's the only sub shop I eat at."

• "I think you should check out Rico's, at South Broadway and Hampden Avenue. They have by far the best $5 meatball sub ever."

• "I am here to say that the Pizza Depot, in Englewood, has the best subs. They have homemade bread."

• "One very important sub shop was not mentioned. The Deli Zone, in Broomfield and Boulder, is sheer perfection when it comes to subs. The Manhattan includes turkey, provolone, artichoke hearts, onions, pesto mayo and then it's lightly toasted. To taste it is to love it."

• "Thank you for recognizing independent sub shops in the Denver area and for the difference you found between them and the chains that all taste the same (yuck!)"

Other sub purveyors earning reader approval include Mr. Lucky's and Boulder's Cafe Food.

Okay, okay, so I just think it's cool that he quoted me. But seriously, you gotta try Fontano's. Just had it for lunch today!

Philosophers Role in the Post-Philosophcial World

From an email sent to my Pragmatism professor:

I've been thinking further about the status of philosophers in the post-Philosophical world and I wanted to clarify my response as I didn't mean for it to come across as too egalitarian.

If we are to take the classical pragmatists suggestion seriously, that all of our conditional a priori axioms come from evolutionarily determined behavioral responses to experience, then, at least at the outset, each human organism is grappling with their own experience in their own particular way.

And this can be confirmed, as every human (or at least person) does have experience. So, we are all at least coming from the same fundamental need to engage with our experience and make some sense of it through inquiry and justification.

Rorty's suggestion, it seems to me, is that we should recognize this process of inquiry and justification for what it is: an attempt to make the world hang together in some coherent way for the time being. (I'm finding it particularly helpful to think of this hanging together as Quine's web of belief, but perhaps I'm wrong in making the analogy).

What is important is that in the post-Philosophical world, where there is no appeal to authority, or metaphysics or even Truth, it becomes up to the individual to make their world hang together in a coherent way - making changes and adjustments as needed. This is not to say that Rorty would deny the importance of community, at Reanna pointed out. However, fundamentally, all individuals can either join in the community of accepted coherence, or they can try their own way and either break new ground or be declared crazy.

I think you are right that if the philosopher is given the task of seeing if things "hang together" in a coherent sense, that is a pronouncement on a philosopher's efforts, work and expertise. And so, in that way professional philosophers would be different from the common man. However, I was trying to emphasize the creativity and personal responsibility which Rorty is urging every person to take up in the post-philosophical world.

In this way, every person is a philosopher because every new vocabulary they decide to try and every act of self-creation could, in fact, become the new philosophy, the new way things "hang together". Putting new systems of ideas out into the intellectual marketplace would certainly no longer be an exclusively philosophical task although philosophers might be the first to recognize the system for what it is.

Every since we read Dewey's idea that philosopher's should solve the problems of men, and not the problems of philosophers, I have been taken with the idea. But I wonder, how can philosopher's solve the problems of men unless they are men? I would like to see philosophy move away from it's specialized and elitist status in order for it to become something which all people are not only engaging in, but want to engage in.

I want to give philosophical tools (i.e., recognition of the coherent, pragmatic solutions, justification, etc.) to men and watch them create better things, make better policy, gain better insights into what it means to be human. That is what I meant by making every person a philosopher in the post-Philosophic world.

DAM Extension

I drove past an event in the life of our city recently. The Daniel Libeskind extension to the Denver Art Museum has been undergoing construction for a few months now, and the steel is finally beginning to take the shape of the momentous structure which it will soon become. I was entranced. I have seen the drawings and the concept designs of this building, but to see it becoming a reality, was rapture. When this structure graces our skyline - a building which has both been designed as a complement to our city as well as purposely been put here to challenge each of us - we will have an everyday object that is a physical expression of many of the ideas and innovations which makes Denver great.
Philosophy and architecture share a great deal in common. Both mediums are trying to look past the veil of reality and find something more real, more clear and more human. For architecture, it must overcome the laws of physics in order to arrive at something novel which will suit the human subject perfectly. For philosophy, it must overcome each subject's own small experiences of the world in an attempt to form them into a coherent manifold which will provide answers to life's questions. In both cases, each discipline is mainly concerned with the human, the subject, the consciousness in a personal and intimate way.

I found this understanding well articulated in a speech by Daniel Libeskind from his website (http://www.daniel-libeskind.com/). In the speech, Libeskind uses 20th century antidote to describe his theory about architecture. While reading this speech (below), I found myself coming to have both a greater appreciation for our historical position as well as deeper understanding of the building which is currently being constructed in our city. I'd love to know what you think!



_____________________________________________________
It is a meaningful and exciting experience to be on this stage tonight to receive an award from a University which in the history of ideas, education and culture has few equals: a University where the voices of Hegel, Kierkegaard, and the pantheon of thinkers who made the world stand on its head, once resounded.
This University, centrally located on Unter den Linden between the Brandenburg Gate and Alexanderplatz, was well-positioned to witness the astonishing events of the 20th Century.

One could recall that Ludwig Mies van de Rohe designed his first glass-walled sky scraper within view from here; Yehudi Menuhin made his debut with Einstein in the audience to applaud him; Georg Grosz recorded his savage observations of Berlin on this Boulevard; and Vladimir Nabokov was here to observe "an elderly rosy-faced beggar woman, with legs cut off at the pelvis... set down like a bust at the foot of the wall... selling paradoxical shoe laces".
But what is particularly fascinating to me is the unexpected encounter between an old refrigerator and atomic physics, on an operating table called Humboldt, an encounter whose fascinating history is perhaps not over yet.

At this very University, sometime before 1934 on a cold and gray day at the end of October, similar to this one, Leo Szilard, an aspiring student from Budapest and Albert Einstein, developed and applied for 29 joint patents in, unbelieveable as it appears, Home Refrigeration!

A sad newspaper story caught the attention of Einstein and Szilard one morning. It was reported in a Berlin newspaper that an entire family, including a number of young children, had been found asphyxiated in their apartment as a result of the inhalation of noxious fumes of the chemical refrigerant used in their primitive refrigerator; a chemical which had escaped in the night through a leaky pump valve.
Applying the sophisticated researches connected to relativity, the two physicists devised a method of pumping a metalicized refrigerant by electro-magnetism, a method that required no moving parts, and therefore no valves that might leak.
AEG signed Szilard as a paid consultant and actually built the Einstein/Szilard refrigerator - an astonishing Berlin object if there ever was one - but alas, these two inventors failed for musical reasons. The magnetic pump was so noisy, compared to even the noisy conventional compressors of the day, that it never left the engineering lab.*

The prophetic linkages which connect asphyxiation and the patenting of the modern refrigerator to a device for accelerating nuclear particles in a circular magnetic field produced a kind of nuclear pump which was instrumental in the construction of the atomic bomb.
The intertwining of gas, tragedy, inconceivable inventions and anti-semitism which finally exiled Einstein and Szilard as carriers of a theory, then deemed hostile to the "German spirit", is emblematic of Berlin and of the Atomic Age it somehow represents.
As I was thinking about what to say today I realized how difficult it is for an architect to speak about his work without the usual paraphernalia of slide projectors and images. Architecture, which is evoked only by words, makes one almost feel 'at home' in language. By surrounding oneself with language one almost comes to believe that one has escaped from the opacity of space and that what remains 'out there' is only an empty stage set. That is perhaps why most intelligent people apply their intelligence and analytic powers to everything but architecture; why architecture is given over to technicians and specialists, and why one is resigned to it as an inevitable and anonymous force which will shape the cities without one's personal participation.

The experience of alienation from architecture, as a dimension of culture, should be contrasted with the stark and astonished encounter with IT - crowned-out, spewed-out into night - resistant to theorization. For then, one might see that architecture - something static and unfeeling, as all that's turned into a coming - can be interpreted, but itself continues to remain oblivious to the interpretation. It continues to live its own existence whether we share it or not.

Perhaps language and its meaning is grounded in the spaces of architecture, and not vice-versa. Consider the functions of foundation, circumcision, territorialization, openness and closure. These are all experiences of space - and of a certain kind of architecture - which provide a symbolic model and understanding of life itself. Is architecture not the quintessential 'taken for granted', the unthinkable, the monstrous, the gender-less, the repressed, the other? Perhaps this is the point of its madness, perhaps it is your conscience: The knot of life in which what is recognized is untied. And what thinking person does not want a fire-place, a home, a Utopia, 'the way it is', 'the way it was'? What thoughtful person is not grateful for the beams of clear lines directed by this silent ray?

What ineffable - immeasurable power of building in the city! The epiphany of the constructible is the strange sucking of the earth's axis. In the realm of architecture, ideas having stared at Medusa turn to stone. Here it is matter which carries the aura of ideas - ideas which metastatize into crystalline sleep-shapes assumed in the language shadow. Wasps, buildings, antennae sting the air, driving the sting to pass through the world of dream and death in order to sense this axis: The Earth's Axis.

All this is accomplished through technique such as drawing wherein an exiled line falls to the ground. Two parallel lines signify a wall; precisely the wall which is between the lines and is not a line. Whether this wall imprisons and releases depends on whether one is a saint or a prisoner. It is doubly illegible; twice over. In attempting to surmount the inner poles of this contradiction, architecture becomes like the plow, turning time up, revealing its invisible layers on the surface.

The power of building is certainly more than meets the eye. It is the non-thematized, the twilight, the marginal, event. But architecture forming this background is a surplus beyond obvious need: that which itself has no legitimacy in a proper foundation. This has led some to ask whether the true and the real need to be embodied at all. Whether one needs architecture or just a simulation mechanism. Whether architecture can flutter nearby like a spirit, the bell or the Internet. It cannot.
In its opacity and resistance, architecture rebels and communicates that only the superfluous, the transcendent, the ineffable is allied to us: the sky, the stars, the gods. I would like to confess my fascination for this strange activity, quite distant from the obsessive technologism, globalized marketing and withered modernism progressively eradicating spiritual life.
I would like to share with you something about the nature of the approach to architecture which I am following, through buildings which not only house exhibitions within them but as architectural works 'exhibit' the world; are indeed the 'production' of the earth. Together they delineate a trajectory which musters the letters, mortal-immortal; show the Aleph as coming after the Beit; the alphabet after the House.
Henry Adams considered the Virgin as the mobilizing form of medieval times and compared her to the dynamo, the mechanism of industrialization. Were he to write today, he would perhaps add to the Virgin and the dynamo - the Museum - as the catalyst and conveyor of reality, since this institution is seen today as a force able to regenerate areas of experience, revive histories, transform images and create a new identity.

Throughout my projects I have followed a certain path which one could name as the search for the Irreplaceable, that which was known by the pagans as the genius loci. I am interested in the unique portrayal of architecture and space of provinces, mountains, maps, ships, horoscopes, fish, instruments, rooms, stars, horses, texts, people. In this labyrinth of places, one can discover the uniqueness of a human face and of a particular hand as a figure of architecture and of the city.

Lines of history and of events; lines of experience and of the look; lines of drawing and of construction. These vectors form a patterned course towards 'the unsubsided' which paradoxically grows more heavy as it becomes more light. I think of it as that which cannot be buried: that which cannot be extinguished: Call it Architecture if you want.

Berlin Museum and the Jewish Museum: addresses; matrix of light; names; echoes of the Void; intermarriage; assimilation; integration; exile; erasure; hope. What is lost in the sky, slender images as blue as shadows, vernal ice, divine ice, spring ice: They are leading a storm cloud by a leash. The music and light of Schoenberg's inaudible space, soundless bridges which illuminate the darker corners of thought.
Nussbaum Haus, Osnabruck: three arches of the Rolandstrasse synagogue, reincarnated in three excavated arches of an ancient Swedish bridge; Osnabruck; Rome; Brussels; Auschwitz; and Osnabruck again. The Nussbaum Haus, the Nussbaum Brücke, the Nussbaumgang, Ohne Ausgang; a triple dislocation in the atmosphere of a quiet town. Read it: It is only a beam; it is only light; it has the power of murmured words.

Victoria & Albert Museum, London: spiralling through William Morris' lightning rod; 'Knowledge' and 'Inspiration' inscribed on the portals; Owen Jones' Grammar of Dreams; Aston Webb's screen; the oblique connection between Constable and Cast Courts. Victorian light fractalized in an endlessly generated aperiodic pattern, de-centering the spiral and releasing innumerable directions. Passages of the spiral through the interlocking continuity of swimming light. Ciphering and decrypting English heritage lodged in the honeycomb cells of the gigantic, brick clock called London.

Imperial War Museum of the North, Manchester: conflict shattered earth; shards reassembled to trace the end of nations, but not of conflict which has never taken place on an abstract plane but in the awful trenches, in salty waters, in air suffocating with smoke. Projection; introjection; suspension; air, earth, water surrounded by Fire; where the earth curves more sharply than anywhere else; the slope becomes unexpectedly extensive, rolls down for as long as the last slave on earth is breathing.

Architecture's reality is as old as the substance of the things hoped for. It is the proof of things invisible. Contrary to public opinion the flesh of architecture is not cladding, insulation and structure, but the substance of the individual in society and history; a figuration of the inorganic and organic, the body and the soul, and that which is visible beyond.

Some would deny this substance and as a result might themselves vanish into the emptiness of "facts" which as indices of power are only the illusory ghosts of a virtual world. One must reject the emptiness of ideologies, the nihilistic obsession with the return of the same, the vacuity of systems which base the whole on its part. The road to authentic construction, just like a smile, cannot be faked for it remains insubordinate, not slave.

Architecture is undergoing an anamnesis: the struggle to remember. Let me share with you one of the most difficult personal decisions I have had to make recently, which was the decision to enter the competition for the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe to be erected in Berlin. An unprecendented task: a Memorial for the world's biggest crime: the murder of 3% German Jews and 97% European Jews. A monument of shame, not honouring anyone; a monument not celebrating anything.

How can such a memorial be built? Would it only reinforce the act of forgetting? What makes it difficult for a foreigner and a Jew living in Berlin to participate in such a project?

Some will say that a memorial of the German people should not be advocated by others. Some persons in the Jewish community say, it is not our memorial, it is Theirs - but we insist that they should do it. Would such a memorial make any difference? No images, no symbols can represent the inconceivable. Only an imageless presentation with a deepening substantial presence might do it. No names of victims are appropriate here; and names of perpetrators are wholly inadequate when speaking of a crime which has a national dimension.

I thought of myself not as someone doing it for the Germans, or instead of the Germans; nor as an architect of just another nationality doing a German project, but rather as someone who has no single identity; himself a product of the Holocaust era.
What does it mean to be German today, after all? The monument is part of the process of finding out. The past that won't pass is not there only for Germans but for everyone else, and it is growing. Does the monument come too late? No. The generations involved in these horrific events could not accomplish it, and even had they been able to, it would not have been credible. The fifty years past are nothing compared to the history of Berlin which is not concluding a period, but opening a new one.

The peculiar site which is the seam between East and West is an emblem of a common ground and a confession - killing fields of a kind - framing the Brandenburg Gate which for fifty years, or one quarter of its two hundred year existence, has been deprived of significance. Such a monument cannot be left to the politicians, to ideologues, those who would try to tell a story with an ending. The innocent idea of the identity of state and society has long gone, destroyed by the behaviour of the German people during the Nazi time, and by the mockery of the GDR version of identity of government and its people.

The Monument is capable of enduring perhaps not because of its force and Name but because of its vulnerability; the weakness of the nameless; what was etched away by the ray-shot wind of language. For a monument is made to endure, but not as the full presence of those whose memory it bears. If there are no more masters, no sand book, and no more sand art, then this very absence not only remains, but expands. Not the full presence of the one whose memory it bears... but on the contrary what remains is a growing memory. Aren't we living in times when even being itself is a recollection? Perhaps the stratagems of architecture are already institutionalized on the principles of the transformation of Being and recollection. The monument should emphatically transforms the work into a remnant, residue, or that which remains when the process is over. This monument is capable of enduring because from the outset it is produced in the form of that which is no longer; the trace of the unborn; the exterminated human being.

The world of Berlin has been stuttered by space in which the guest, a name sweated down from the wall, a wound up in the air, stands in the time-void. Such a place is a body open for air, silence, stars: solidifies the time-void into those image gaps harbored in the slit-arteries of awareness. We travel largely the last of the sonic booms...receives us: the boosted heart pace, outside, in space, brought home to the axis of Earth.
The Spiritual in architecture is urgent, though it seems to have become an embarrassment, a rumor on the street. The spiritual, appropriated by the fundamentalist right, has been expropriated from culture and history, eliminated from discourse through which it should be reclaimed. One should attempt to retrieve the spirit of architecture, to recall its Humanity, even within a situation in which the goal and the way have been eclipsed. The erasure of history and its carriers, the obliviousness of the market economy to the degradation and ongoing genocide of human beings must be countered with a deeper awareness and action.

Architecture is and remains the ethical, the true, the good and the beautiful, no matter what those who know the price of everything and the value of nothing may say.

Contemporary architecture is splitb bitterness/sweetness, strictly, the ends of its smile go off into the anarchy of life, opening a paradoxical freedom.

Battle for Algiers

On April 8, 2004, Drew and I went to see "The Battle of Algiers". The movie, made in 1965, is a powerful and gritty account of the nearly decade long fight of the native Islamic Algerian population to throw off colonial oppression and 130-years of French rule in the 1950s and 60s. Algeria finally won their independence in 1962. From economic disparity to the implementation of "interrogation" by French soliders, the movie tells an even-handed story about revolution, terrorism and the rule of law.

The depiction of terrorism and terrorists in "The Battle of Algiers" is neither sickenly idealistic nor easily condemnable. At every turn during the film you realize that you are dealing with real people, with real lives who are fighting for real and important goals. The Islamic revolutionaries themselves are easily recognizable - their rhetoric about freedom and self-determination could be coming from the likes of Thomas Jefferson and George Washington. The French characters (especially the soldiers brought in to supress the revolution) are harder to come to grips with. While they use horrific torture to get information about the revolutionaries - these are men who resisted the Nazis, went to concentration camps, and are now fighting for their own country and ideals.

I think that it is important for Americans to understand why we were attacked and what Al Quaeda, and now the Iraqi insurgents, are fighting for. Unless we can find a way to sympathize with their situation and come to some cooperative understanding, perhaps we will learn the hard way that terroism cannot be stopped until the war of ideas has been adequately understood.

I have included a link to Starz, as well as some other links (both conservative and liberal) about the movie so that you can judge for yourself.

http://www.starzfilmcenter.com/moreinfo-soon.php?1602Battle


http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0907-07.htm

http://www.amconmag.com/2_2_04/article1.html