Luis Fernández-Galiano considers that contemporary architecture is fully linked to spectacle and chaos. "We live in a regular and Cartesian world and yet architecture, imitating the world of fashion or design, allows itself to be seduced by disorder. Some people compare the architect's work to that of a seismograph, which must pick up the tremors of society without trying to correct them, and that is a mistake," said the Full Professor of Architectural Projects at the Polytechnic University of Madrid during his lecture at the School of Architecture of the University of Navarra.

Fernández-Galiano wanted to highlight the importance that 9/11 has also had for the world of architecture. "Perhaps the world began to change before, with the fall of the Berlin Wall, but we cannot forget that the material organizer of the attacks in New York, Mohamed Atta, was an architect. They had a great organizational capacity and few architects thought that a colleague, who made programs of study of urban planning in Hamburg and defended his thesis about the preservation of heritage in Arab cities, was capable of carrying out such a destructive action," said Fernandez-Galiano.

Architectural consumerism

On the other hand, Full Professor underlined the current tendency to build uniform urbanizations: "The contemporary world equalizes cities to the maximum. We are facing the global city and today if we see a photo of a housing development, we have no idea whether we are in Shanghai, California or Europe. We are invading the territory with our real estate debris, but not only with cities, but also with shopping centers, airports, amusement parks,... making the city grow like a virus," criticized Fernández-Galiano.

In his opinion, the promoters of the new architecture are not the only ones to blame for this process, the architects of yesterday bear little resemblance to those of today. "In the past, professionals aspired to appear on banknote paper, like Le Corbusier on Swiss francs, for example. Now, however, the aspiration is to appear on the couché paper of fashion magazines, since it has more impact," he said.

He ended his speech by advocating for an architecture that breaks with fashion, with architectural consumerism and aims to regenerate society and rejects the role of simple seismograph that some attribute to it.