The Aesthetic Crisis as the Crisis of the Glance

This incapacity to artialiser and therefore see the landscapes of the contemporary period is a crisis of the glance. In this sense, the crisis of aesthetics is also a crisis of the glance at the city, manifested as a passive, not critical, glance. They are two types of glance which encounter two conceptual worlds: one reflects the “environmental image” of the city, the “outer covering” (Kaijima and Tsukamoto 2006) of the inevitable dynamics of the metropolis, the other making reference to what is in some ways the “counterspace” of the metropolis, the space available for the project, the space that allows us still to design for the city. The active, collective glance at the city makes us feel we belong to a whole, it reveals to us the contemporary public space.