ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author argues that, in the present state of global capitalism, critical historiography should examine the theoretical implications of the notion of standstill time as discussed by Walter Benjamin. The author raises two questions here: first, what are the theoretical implications of making an analogy between a standstill concept of time and the globalization of contemporary architectural praxis? For example, how should one can index the differences between the current globalization of architecture and the International Style architecture of the 1930s? Second, what is the task of the historian today, when the historical distance is seemingly collapsed, and its memory is decoded in the many facets of the present speedy experience of temporality? The author explores these issues to unpack Siegfried Kracauer's "provisional insight into the last things before the last" as far as architectural historiography is concerned.
