ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) was commissioned to design a plan for doubling the size of the city of Hanoi. As victim of an Asian financial crisis, OMA's plan was not implemented but its twin-city configuration presaged a common, if less visionary logic of development in many cities all over the world today. Far from the nuanced arguments of the original authors of Critical Regionalism, the rallying cries for architectures of "Identity, Place and Human Experience" against the homogenizing forces of globalization project great optimism through a narrow lens. While architects have long been concerned with conditions of site, the idea that design should create a unique expression of a particular site is a relatively recent preoccupation. While the specter of groundlessness remains a predicament of design work, architecture's location in contemporary contexts compels reconsideration of the parameters by which the site of architectural work is defined.
