Architecture in the age of acceleration

AR481: ARCHITECTURE IN THE AGE OF ACCELERATION

Dr. Véronique Patteeuw - veronique.patteeuw@epfl.ch

ABSTRACT

In Thank You for Being Late (2016), Thomas Friedman claims that there is reason to describe the past decades as an 'age of accelerations'. In his analysis the convergence of globalization, technology and climate-change makes ‘all the difference’. Since the publication in 1972 of the Club of Rome’s report The Limits to Growth (LTG),^[1] we have witnessed an era of exponential development: Population increase, agricultural production, non-renewable resource depletion, industrial output, and pollution generation, the five variables analysed at the time, have been increasing and continue to do so exponentially.^[2] The conclusions of the Limits to Growth were pioneering as they drew the contours of our age of acceleration and predicted that if no changes to historical growth trends would appear, ‘the limits to growth on earth would become evident by 2072, leading to sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity.’^[3] Looking back in time, we observe how the Club of Rome was not only right in its predictions, but lay the foundations of what we experience today, as climate change has accelerated the sudden and uncontrollable collapse of our planetary system.^[4]

The unprecedented condition of acceleration, challenges any understanding of architecture. It affects not only architecture as a discipline and as a profession, it also calls into question our roles, tools and methods. Conventional design instruments for example seem increasingly unsuitable. Master plans, developed from a bird's eye perspective do, in the condition of acceleration, no longer meet the current demands for analyses and projects rooted in the experience of the (built) human environment, nor the need to read the different layers and meanings of a place from the perspectives of movement and time. The traditional role of the architect in between client and contractor no longer holds in numerous circumstances; and conventional architecture methods have been put into question by a growing number of practitioners.

While the world of construction reacts to the current crises essentially from the perspective of sustainable development, a number of engaged intellectuals recommends the inevitable and radical change of our ways of living and inhabiting the world. Indeed, since the early eighties theoreticians such as Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Rosi Braidoti and many others have critically questioned and thematised our age of acceleration arguing for degrowth, third spaces, circular economies and Gaia. Their observations often call for a transversal approach, across disciplinary and policy boundaries. Although architecture is not central to these writings, their observations shift our ways of understanding and designing space. Where can we find proper architectural responses to the current condition? Should we refrain from building or can we think of valid alternatives to be explored? Are the answers necessarily to be found outside the architectural field? Or, on the contrary, can architectural history and theory offer new perspectives?

COURSE DESCRIPTION AND METHODOLOGY

This course considers the systemic challenges posed by the continued climate crisis, rapid urbanization and globalization, as well as the threat of collapsing eco-systems as the starting point for theoretical reflection on architectural design today. But, instead of searching for answers outside the discipline, it stays as close as possible to architecture itself. In other words, an underlying point of this course is the conviction that the discipline already offers a rich field of knowledge on which to build possible answers to the current crises.

The course proposes to investigate six strategies - Territoriality, Regionalism, Participation, Transformation, Commonality and Autonomy - looking at their historical roots in the postmodern period and projecting their applicability all the way into our contemporary era, allowing students to uncover both historical continuities and new possible directions. Each strategy will be anchored in a key text of the period (1961-1992) and will testify to the political and social contexts in which architects have started to challenge their role under the conditions of modernity. 

The changed perspective on fundamental aspects of technology and culture which is the result of a growing acknowledgment of the finite nature of global resources is also reflected in the rediscovery and rereading of authors. These texts will be analysed, situated and most importantly debated with the students, in relation to current architectural practices. Therefore, going beyond mere critical re-readings of the recent past, this course proposes to open up a discussion on the relevance of these strategies for today’s practice vis-à-vis conditions of acceleration.

For their final essay, students will look at specific examples of architectural practices, always from the hypothesis that architects, through the very act of defining and redefining their roles, exert different forms of agency on and beyond the building site. As such, they will explore new insights in the relationship of architecture to society and of the architect to the act of conceiving space. Offering new perspectives on and understandings of the age of acceleration, this course aims to show how current strategies have emerged as alternatives to modernization.

AIMS AND LEARING OUTCOMES

The aim of this course is to foster a comprehensive self-awareness of a set of strategies that serve as responses to conditions of acceleration, in order to position one’s own architectural agency. In combination with a historico-theoretical foundation, it addresses the methodological potential of the plural roles and tools of the architect.

Upon the successful completion of the course, students will have acquired:

●      fundamental knowledge to build and relate an awareness of historical developments of postmodern architectural and environmental thematic in the second half of the 20th century, both canonical and alternative;

●      critical and analytical skills (research, presentation, discussion, writing) to explore and better understand the interplay of environmental forces and constraints, conditions of modernization and critical voices, which drive architecture and planning today;

●      key methods and concepts, to evaluate and answer in a precise and subtle way what was, is and might be in the future humankind’s relation to the planet and the subsequent roles the architect can play.