a bridge to a narcissistic void....
The "bridge to the 21st century" was, perhaps, clinton's most delusional conceit, so it is not surprising that it would become clinton's self-referential metaphor of choice. His library was to be that bridge, if he had anything to say about it... The architect is often the master of the inside joke, witness Robert Venturi's postmodern chairs. Venturi exploited--unabashedly and with abandon--the vocabulary of Las Vegas, its stage-set-as-reality and its roadside culture--bright, clashing, ugly and fake. The architect's inside joke is his hedge against the sycophancy that comes with patronage. The flip side of the encoded meaning of the architect is the terrorist's decoding of it. To bin Laden, the World Trade Center was Jewish capitalism encoded in urban space. If Polshek's vision of clinton's library is a bridge, the inside joke is that, at best, it is a bridge to nowhere. More likely, it is a bridge to the 7th century...or a doublewide to house clinton double-speak. Take your choice. Mia T, WRITTEN IN STONE: AN ARCHITECT DEFINES THE CLINTONS |