The year 2020 had so many global challenges (climate change induced fires, floods and storms, an international awareness of racism and police violence, a pandemic and at least one super power leader keeping the world on edge) that architecture almost seems like a frivolous footnote. Something that only the privileged few have time or energy to consider, Churchill's observation that we shape buildings and then they shape us notwithstanding.
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2020: Man not any longer the center
of architecture?
Da Vinci's Vetruvian Man |
Upon closer inspection, though, architecture, design, planning and the built environment influence all those global challenges and are affected by them. Folks in those professions no longer sit in an ivory tower, instead they design solutions, ask important questions and explore possible futures.
Sometimes those explorations can be valid, sometimes embarrassing. At times they are both at once, as in the case of Rem Koolhaas' Guggenheim exhibition in which he rediscovers the "countryside" ...
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[Klaus] Philipsen FAIA
Archplan Inc. Philipsen Architects
Baltimore MD
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