Well aware of the human cost of Central Park; that, in fact, is part of the argument, even though I should add: What do we do that does not have a human cost? Just try to buy some clothes! The point I was making, however, was that thinking big is not just doing big things, but that we live in a completely artificial world – have for a long time - in which problem solving at that scale has to be tempered by a discourse of history and theory (that being the old model), or at least some form of critical speculation about human nature and its associated social practices. The big has to meet abjection – otherwise it is just more of the same-old-big. But where does this encounter take place? Can the architectural academe be trusted to do this? I am increasingly skeptical. My other point, to conclude, was not that we should do finger pointing about the social consequences, for we can lament for-ever the ever monstrous realities of capital, but that we can still manage to have a utopian-driven ambition for society in which architecture plays aleading role (which is different from museum-globalism). That was what I meant by the 'center.' But because there is a tendency to flatten discourse, we get neither interesting utopias nor an interesting intellectual core, but a type of can-do-avant-guardism.

(Hi javier!, hope all is well)