At a Chinese New Year celebration, I asked my cookie to give feedback on a very public project that we were most recently involved in.

fortune
That is what the cookie said.

Friedrich St. Florian made the observation that considering the length of human existence, fifty years here and there without architecture is barely noteworthy. The way he put it was, “The world can do without architecture for fifty years.”

This seems to be no big deal, really, when you think of it.

Building goes on, governed by substitutes for architecture: pseudo sociological programming, realty logic or developer logic.

That is the literal interpretation of my fortune…with building referring to “bricks and mortar.” But with the recent revolutions in Tunisia and Eygpt, more significant world building comes to mind.

Social Media played a role as a tool chest for the necessary gathering of outrage, intent and action, but the will to define change and a sustained commitment of action had to have been there in the first place.

This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes, by William Hutchinson Murray:

Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back, always ineffectiveness. Concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth the ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans: that the moment one definitely commits oneself, the providence moves too. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents, meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamt would have come his way.

This makes me ask, was our president’s campaign slogan “yes we can” fitting for our country’s people and times?