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Ole Bouman
:
They are not portrayed very well, although things are slowly changing. We consent to live in an age of acceleration, which risks not only our moral sanity but also ignores the existential limitations of our planet. Architecture, over the last few decades, has not only been impacted by this process, in many ways it has become the face of it. If not its substance.
But if you analyze its course over history, architecture looks much better. If we summarize some cornerstones in the history of human motivation - tributes to our ancestors, celebrations of glory, manifestations of ingenuity, pursuits of enlightenment, trumpeting emancipation, you can imagine architecture as mankind’s most respectable vehicle. Architecture has given us an honorable response to death, to failure, to aggression, to stupidity, and to greed. We are waiting for new, equally grandiose responses, to reset our current overshoot. They are already there, actually: inclusivity, sustainability, imaginat
we can all be designers.
So, how can architecture, as our profoundly human endeavor, help us to rediscover our sense of measure and battle excess and abuse?
Surely not by accepting what today is defined as architecture by the people who claim it as their territory. On the contrary, architecture as the art of measure has been virtually forgotten by a building practice that, despite some singular efforts to counter it, is still largely adding to ecological and moral overshoot. The same is true of its discourse which continues to overshadow common sense. On the contrary, current architectural practice privileges a frenzied production of new projects, new reputations, and new events, restlessly crisscrossing the globe for opportunities to excel. It took a global pandemic to impose a quantitative limit. What will it take to make this limit a quality in itself?