God in reverse: Art, architecture and consciousness
Richard Goodwin’s recent book, God in reverse: Art, architecture and consciousness (Uro Publications, 2018), is about Sydney in a way that is similar to how Fellini’s film Roma was about Rome. The final chapter is an account of driving Wolf Prix, co-founder and CEO of Coop Himmelblau, around Sydney in Goodwin’s car (an event that actually did occur) that cleverly morphs into an imagined remaking of that Fellini film. Both God in reverse and Roma are semi-autobiographical, episodic, radically open in structure, inherently political, philosophical, and attentive across scales, from the intimate to the macrocosmic. In holding up a multifaceted mirror to Sydney, the book might be seen as a call to architecture to respond to the growing global barbarism of our times through the central idea of “the expansion of
