practice

times (not the magazine), economy, architects

Architects are very well know for putting bits and pieces of other’s people work together in order to form some kind of quasi-comprehensive and elaborated theory. At least most of them. Some others however do preoccupy themselves with constructing really valuable pieces of truly scientific research which aims to point of a direction to the future. Hemant’s post on “a thousand unemployed architects” is just a great starting point for the kind of argument I wanted to make here anyway. The post also came with perfect timing - I have read it on Monday night, just after I came back from Michael Weinstock lecture at the AA.

Weinstock argument was very reach with implications to social, biological and computational sciences, but if one would like to boil it down to an argument strictly relevant for masters of architecture students (the lecture was after all meant to be a part of DRL lecture series), it was that the architects role is inevitably going to be a subject to change. According to Weinstock, architect current role is the one of “shape makers”. But he precisely said that he doesn’t believe this role will last for even a decade, simply because nobody will be able to afford the shape-makers’ work in forthcoming economical and political climate.

Michael Weinstock has some very suggestive arguments about how many people will have to move to other parts of the world even if only the very moderate predictions of worlds’ average temperature rise (3.5 degrees Celsius) will become true. Due to those migrations, and very widely discussed great drying up, we will witness great shifts in power distribution across the globe. A whole new scene, in social, cultural and political sense, is likely to emerge. Thus architects work will be the one of adaptation of spatial formations to these new conditions. It will be more of rebuilding than building from scratch. And it will be rebuilding not in purely physical sense - demolishing what was there and erecting monuments of new times, but rather in the sense of reinventing the performance of spatial formations. Architects then, Weinstock argues, need to become aware of the complex systems behind the spatial formations on every scale, ranging from a scale of a molecule, to a scale of “metropolis”. He is also not afraid of saying directly, that there is no theoretical or ethical reason to start “designing nature 2”.

The whole argument about understanding the notion of adaptivity of human environment is entirely appealing to me. Yet I’m skeptical about one detail. Isn’t it actually an argument which should be presented to policy makers as well as to corporate decision makers, rather than to architects themselves? After all - is the architect himself able to redirect the course of history? Forgive me, but I absolutely need to quote my old friend here (and a little time frame would be necessary here too, since he said it at 4PM while we where finishing a housing competition, and I was still working in a Spanish company in Warsaw at the time); what did he said actually?: Todos estamos prostitutas. I don’t think this needs any translation. Taking upon the issue slightly more seriously, Weinstock criticizes the “new cities”, such as Masdar, coming from the Fosters office as cities which repeat the mistakes of already existing urban formations, being completely isolated from the surrounding environment. But is it Foster, who makes the decision about the localization and about the character of this new project? Most importantly, does Foster decides on the timetable for it’s completion? Rather not. The developer (be it a government, a dictator or a multinational corporation) is to “blame” here. Blame is putted in quotation marks because the architectural community can not expect developers to posses knowledge about cutting edge theories in the field of built environment, if it didn’t make an effort to communicate them in the first place.

So, after all, it seems there are tough times ahead of us. I don’t particularly agree that architecture in 2010 will be able to go back conceptually to where it was in 2008. The time of “shape-makers” might not be back. But, on the other hand, the times of change are always the times of opportunity, if only one doesn’t let himself fall into stagnation and accept the status-quo (I know it’s a cliche). Architects will need to adapt the way they work, but they also have to try to influence the ways in which people outside of the profession think. There can be little doubt that Michael Weinstock tries to do just that. One of his more important remarks which I remember from his lecture over a year ago, back at Iaac in Barcelona, was that the biggest problem of architects is that they tend to talk only to themselves. We urgently need to start to talk to policy makers and all other kinds of people in order to make them aware of the concepts which concern us all (us - all, not us - architects). Perhaps embracing the web 2.0 tools would be a good way to do that. I suppose that’s one of the aims for which this very site was created.

Michal Piasecki

Photo by AndrewEick; from Flickr

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