where is the north-american architecture?

thanks to Letícia’s work at the UN, I had the chance to come to NYC a couple of times in the last few months.

and walking around Manhattan and Brooklyn, I was lining up a series of recent buildings that I thought I must see: The New Museum by Kasuo Sejima; Jean Nouvel at Soho, Herzog & de Meuron at 40 Bond St; NYTimes tower and Morgan library by Renzo Piano; the diamond tower by Foster; and Gehry’s building at 18th St. at the Hudson River.

so goes the label of this post. With Gehry being the exception that proves the rule (born in Canada, living in LA for 40 years), all the others are foreigners.

after the boom of the 70s and 80s with Eisenman, Meyer, Graves and etc, there is no young generation of north-american architects capable of substituting the "whites" and "grays".

perhaps Phillip Johnson is veeery much missed,

or perhaps the answer is in an article that Michael Speaks wrote 10 years ago in which he presented a clamorous difference between the US avant-guard with its elaborated manipulation of the form and geometries; and the European avant-guard more concerned with buildings performance and the transformations in the design process brought by new technologies

I tend to think that after 20 years of the so-called critical-discourse the north-american architecture suffers from a certain disorientation

much like a dog that fell out of a moving truck, it knows that there is no coming back to the old house of blobs and geometric manipulations based on drawing; nor it knows how to reach the new house built out of a neo-pragmatism with modernist roots and sustainable veneer.