0) Who were the people who came before?

People remember their homes long after they’ve forgotten the name of their street. Most of the time, memory systems run quietly in the background as we go about the business of everyday life. Architecture works both as semantic memory, when its buildings, monuments, and ruins refer to general facts that have no real bearing on our personality and are independent of our personal experience. It works as episodic memory when it recollects our real-life events or experiences; the first kiss under the arch, the street of the incident, the building where our best friend used to live, the station of his last departure. All our decisions get integrated into a system that has evolved despite the past. The present is a process where we have to resist different ways of thinking for every decision we are going to make in the future. In the process, we have also to resist fears. Among what we fear (which is a survival process) fearing each other is becoming a very big part of (we do not fear lions or cold weather, etc.).

Monuments may engender a sense of national pride among ourselves, but they also serve as a source of rage or offense for our enemies. We fear the world that others create and we are amazed that outsiders fail to recognize us for who we consider ourselves to be. We see many of the consequences may disconnect us in our ever-changing cities.

Like linguistic communication, architecture consists of codes, meanings, semantic shifts, and syntactic units. We know architecture in terms of conceptual space, perceived space, and lived-in space, all of which supply multiple levels of meaning.

And here begins the struggle to discern between lived events and myths, between memories and the product of someone’s imagination. Inside a solid world, such as the architecture of a city, our brain does not question what it sees: there is no reality check, no automatic search for objective evidence or meaning when we view a monument. Likewise, when looking at a city skyline, we lose our ability to desegregate architecture as illusion. We may instead get a sense of unfamiliarity.

Even simple acts like crossing a road may cause frustration, sadness, confusion. Similarly, street and building names are marks of authority that mask the experience of the city and organize the contradictions and complexities of our daily lives. Architecture shapes our sense of history and reflects who we are as a society and as individuals. Buildings and cities are historical documents, containing a lot of information. These documents, of course, are written largely by those who won the war, not by the tribes and people which have the better stories. This leaves many people, especially the disenfranchised—history’s losers—feeling that history is moving away from them. But future events are not exact replicas of past events; and an architecture that celebrates the past at the expense of the present, as lived by a city’s inhabitants, may not be well suited to stimulating a future that is hospitable to all.

How could we define a boundary that respects the present and the future as well as the  past? How could we construct a safe fence within which we could have a safe operating space for both memory and identity of a city which belongs to all its inhabitants and respects all its narratives? In order to make a city such a place of concentrated diversity, where various peoples’ cultures and languages and lifestyles comingle, we must find ways to consistently absorb new infusions of history and memories and identities; and we must learn to dissolve the historical fears and uncertainties we hold about one another so that we can work toward a true exchange of values.

What can architecture say about the future, from cultural to linguistic changes to the lessons of the deadliness of wars?

If cities were part of biology, they would die. Yet the truth is that very few cities fail. Even if they collapse under an earthquake or get sacked by invaders, or suffer destruction under the bombing of an enemy, after a relatively short while they rise again. For cities are organic in a human way; they repair themselves and regrow via a series of human interactions. So, what about the future of architecture now? Well, the future poses a massive challenge to humankind: to provide a physical form for interpretation and experience that does not celebrate defeat, exclusion, and does not dictate the path of a singular meaning, but rather offers a variety of multiple collective narratives.

Architecture also must expand, not erode, the boundaries of universal recognition for all people, for all histories. The architecture of the future must create space for new and better human narratives. It must recognize that humans are much more than the sum of their memories.