The third millenium began in Seattle on the 4th of December 1999. Many awaited it at Greenwich, under the huge tent that Richard Rogers built on the Meridian, in uneven competition with the Pacific atolls where the time zones situate the change of date, and in disdainful indifference to the computer chaos augured by the somber omens of the millennium bug. Nevertheless Y2K overtook the calendar, and first laid bare its political countenance and fractured social landscape in the incubator of the approaching future: the city that is home to Boeing, Microsoft and Amazon, where a coalition of poor countries, trade unionists and NGOs questioned before the world the inexorable trend toward globalization. In the cradle of grunge, Starbucks and Frazier, a popular revolt of a kind unheard of since the sixties brought on the failure of the World Trade Organization’s Millennium Round, cracking the armor plating of single market, single society and single thought. Convoked by the Internet and coordinated by mobile phones, Seattle demonstrators confronted Robocop policemen in an at once archaic and futuristic conflict that portends the coming century’s political debate between globalization and its discontents.

Under the sign of globalization, 1999 saw the energetic boom of the American economy dampening the debut of Europe’s single currency, the timid recovery of Japan and the vigorous breakthrough of China, while the decomposition of Russia and the old socialist bloc was sprinkled with Balkan and Caucasian wars, Latin America swayed to the populist temptations of Chiapas or Chávez, and sub-Saharan Africa continued to fall in a black hole of misery and AIDS. And in this torn world (where, ten years after the disappearance of the Berlin wall, military, economic and cultural leadership is entirely in the hands of a single power, which even serves as a reticent venue for challenges to its hegemony such as that staged in Seattle), architecture still had its most stimulating experimental laboratory in Europe. Nourished by the polarization between Swiss and Dutch, European architecture wrote the year’s most brilliant chapters. American architects with a greater cultural and artistic vocation continued to come to the old continent for the receptive environment they do not alwaysf ind in the United States, and the most relevant debates of American universities revolved around European episodes such as situationism or Team X: exercises on historical memory to which Weimar’s turn as culture capital contributed the inevitable revision of the legacy of the Bauhaus, that fountainhead of modernity we still feed on.

But in Spain not all was good news, and December closed with the end of the ETA truce, after a fourteen-month impasse in in terrorist actions, resituating the Basque Country in a convulsive landscape unworthy of the Guggenheim and the Kursaal. While the wounds of Ireland healed up, and the progress of peace-making in Palestine allowed Aznar to spend Christmas Eve with Arafat in Bethlehem, the sores of Kosovo and the splintered fracture of Chechnya remained open, undermining the perpetual peace of the global market with the demagogy of facts. A placid peace broken in Seattle by a Woodstock of solidarity determined to remind the world that the greater part of humanity is marginalized by the economic market, the political market and the symbolic market; marginalized by liberal capitalism, representative democracy and the media; and marginalized, too, by that phenomenon of culture and spectacle we are used to call architecture.