Mark Wigley: Resisting the City

„In a globalized age of electronic flows, tourism has changed. Travel is increasingly virtual, both in the sense that one does not have to leave the room in order to travel, and in the sense that when one does go to another place it is increasingly similar to the place one left behind. At the same time, our increasingly virtual lifestyle has turned the unique material specificity of each site into a fetishistic attraction. Tourism stages a special dance between the virtual and the real. This poses a unique design challenge to the architect. This challenge is multiplied because the architect has always been a special kind of tourist, constantly traveling, recording, analyzing, and designing on the basis of what they see on the move. This lecture will explore the mobile figure of the architect orchestrating overlapping streams of graphic information as a form of resistance to the increasingly dematerialized global city". (Mark Wigley)