I thought Badiou’s metaphor was spot on, and wonderfully written. It captured the feeling I think many of us share when faced with the financial crisis. Mere bystanders, as powerless to act upon it, as spectators in a cinema are to alter the course of the film. And so we sit, and stare, and hope that the impending disaster will be averted by our heroes in the nick of time. But as the scenes of sinking stock markets, mounting debt and countries on the brink of bankruptcy flash by, our heroes appear to be as ignorant and inept to saves us, as we are ourselves.

He incites us to look away from the screen, at the crowd around us. That’s where the real crisis lies. In the jobless, the homeless, the truncated lives. It is ironic that it all started (arguably) with the sub-prime mortgage, the chance for many to finally own a home, the American dream, that human right. It was an almost noble cause, never mind the real motive of profit.  And now the very ones who had finally been given a breakthrough, are paying the dearest, and are worse off than at the beginning of the whole endeavor.

The noble cause was corrupted, and the American dream was abused. As Badiou wittingly remarks, it transformed “people into capricious children and eternal adolescents whose lives revolve around getting new toys”. It was no longer just about a home, but a lifestyle, that had been hammered into the popular conscious, through trash culture. Life in engorged houses with ice-making refrigerators and three-car garages, shopping sprees and frivolous pampering, because we deserved it, you are worth it, or so we were made to believe.

Badiou is trying to direct some of the finger pointing at ourselves. Yes, the crisis was concocted by the Wall Street predators and their mathematician wizards, but we fueled all that speculation. The baffling complexity of the global financial market, our inability to grasp its inner workings does not excuse us from it. And its recent reality check is a reminder of a consumer society gone astray. Only in realizing this, can we start taking some responsibility and initiative. We must start to look away from the screen. We must lose the fear that our governments are instilling in our confused minds, and start to deal with the scene in the cinema. I'm not sure I would go as far as proposing a return to communism (that didn’t turn out too well, did it?) but I do believe it is time to put this “capital-parliamentarism” in doubt. It might even be time to let the banks fail…

As for Mead’s text, I thought it was quite amusing. I found it quite refreshing to read about the architect, and not the architecture. So often an architect is aggrandized through his or her work (understandibly), and you forget that there is a person behind the myth. Having said so, it is quite bewildering that one of the “geniuses” in architecture struggles to express her process of creation. It wouldn’t be the first time that a brooding psyche struggles with words, but she did appear to be quite coherent when not speaking about architecture.

“I rather suspect that Zaha has an ancient fear: that to discover how here processes work would be to jeopardize them” . This begs a comparison with the financial market, derivatives and hedge funds that no one really understood, but the logarithm experts who designed them, generating profit out of nothing. Zaha’s unknown process, unknown even to her, with her own of clan of parametric wizards, generating architecture, out of... well, apparently, nothing.

What if there is no process at all, if its all random, intuitive at a stretch?. It would be a bit of a worrying thought. If she became a trend to follow, how do you teach a non-process? Would architecture be reduced to spasms of pseudo-intuition and computer scripting? What a terrible fate this would be. It would herald an architectural crisis en par with that spawned by the Wall Street bloodhounds.