whole; practices that expiate guilt for, and therefore inadvertently provide continuing legitimacy for, celebrity trend-surfing and spectacular politically acquiescent practice such as Koolhaas’ Central Chinese Television (CCTV) project. Thus the virtues of this resistance work can be spun as if by in-house parliamentary ethics advisors: ‘Forgive me father, for I have appeared on the cover of El Croquis ’; ‘I forgive you, my son; publish five ecological remediation and self-build projects’. A discerning and independent architectural criticism is vital if the achievements of ethically motivated design work are to sustain their own critical charge, and their advocacy of alternative directions for the investment of expertise.
Graham Owen is Associate Professor of Archi- tecture at Tulane Univer- sity.
*expiation as global growth industry Here I take my cue from the telling
insights of Hal Foster. 3 As he suggests, the conflation of spectacle and expiation of globalised trauma occurs in the work of Empathists-sans-Frontières such as Daniel Libeskind. What has been particularly fascinating, though, about the installation of his global trauma-brand franchises in Toronto and New York is Libeskind’s insistence on his local credentials in each case: an echt Torontonian from the 1970s (‘It is a kind of personal homecoming for me’ 4 ) — although astute observers may have noted the conspicuous absence of Libeskind’s Toronto experience from his published bios until the ROM came calling; and, almost immediately thereafter, a born- and-bred New Yorker, a living embodiment of the American Dream, one of Liberty’s ‘tired and homeless’ risen to I-feel-your- pain stardom, the Dr. Phil of architecture.
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