If you happen to turn to the blurb on the back cover of any novel by the American author Richard Brautigan, you will probably come across the following sentence. We never really know who wrote it but it seems to turn up time and time again: “There is nothing like Richard Brautigan anywhere.” Perhaps when we are very old, people will write ‘Brautigans’, just as they now write novels. The unnameable at the San Francisco Sunday Examiner and Chronicle continues to tickle our future fancy: “This man has invented a genre, a whole
new shot, a thing needed, delightful and right.”
It was time to have another go at this new shot. Modern Architecture in the 21st Century was becoming the architecture it had threatened to become for the whole of the last century. Buildings were lying around, abandoned, legs up in the air. Cathedrals were back in vogue. Rumours, of the sort that had become reality, were exchanged as fast as they could be invented.