It may be unfathomable in architecture, but it is very practical, or routine, for a person in theater to use action. You have the line, "Come home, son," but you can't play that line by going out and being a mother; you can't be a noun. But you can play to smother your son; you can play to grovel to your son. Again, the real information is carried in action. And, to an annoying degree, theater people talk to each other in infinitive expressions. If you don't have a vivid verb to describe what you're doing, you're probably going to be a pretty bad actress.

It wasn't an architect who did this, but if it had been an architect, it would have been a good day's work: there was a marketing person who convinced Walmart that their products sold better in daylight than electric light. It would have been interesting if an architect had deliberately designed this change with all its spatial consequences in mind, thinking about how the change would multiply across all the square footage of all the roofs of all the Walmarts in the world. It would have been a beautiful trick - a physical, practical, political pleasure.

It would never occur to me to map my research against events in my life, and the recent history of globalization seems to be part of someone else's life. Still, maybe I have been trying to fill in a history or address that amnesia for the recent past. There's so much that's opaque about the ways in which extra layers of global governance have developed since Pax Americana and really accelerated in these last thirty, forty years.

In architecture, to do anything beyond object form is often treated as something extra-disciplinary - something outside the discipline that has nothing to do with art. So I'm making it clear that this is an artistic choice. It's not everyone's artistic choice. Some people should choose only to make object form because that's what gives them pleasure. But there are people for whom aesthetic pleasure comes from doing something else, and why would you deny that choice? It's another autonomous choice.

Few would look at a concrete highway system or an electrical grid and perceive agency in their static arrangement, spaces and urban arrangements are usually treated as collections of objects or volumes, not as actors. Yet the organization itself is active. It is doing something.

Whether railroads or electricity or the Internet, there is always some sense that this is the new, redemptive platform - that finally, finally, we've found the platform that will allow us all to lead a democratic, global existence, where all problems will be solved. And the idea that the old platform becomes obsolete, "this kills that," and so on, also often accompanies the advent of a new technology. The digital platform is no exception.

I thought architecture would offer a mix of the artful and practical. It seemed cooler than some of the other options in the university. The lights were on in the architecture school when I got out of rehearsal at night. And I thought the men were handsome.