Past, Present, Future Architecture: historical examples and contemporary possibilities

Becca of MOULD wrote an article for Architecture Research Quarterly, a journal published by Cambridge University Press.

ABSTRACT

Climate breakdown demands new ways of thinking, new ways of relating to other human and non-human beings, and therefore new ways of approaching the future. Approaches to the future that adequately account for the climate need to be sufficiently far-reaching to avoid quick-fix solutionism, and sufficiently grounded to avoid unbounded flights of visionary fancy. The climate crisis is a gritty, contested situation that cannot be approached through one means alone. If architecture and spatial practice realise their inherent interdisciplinary potential, they could contribute to forming new modes of spatial relation that have profoundly social and climatic implications.

The reverse is equally true: the social, economic, and environmental shifts required will bring new spatial formations which require new spatial practices. This essay explores how futures may be thought of in terms more appropriate to climate. Architects and spatial practitioners are capable of effecting social and ecological change despite their historical implication in the structures and practices of the extractive capitalist system within which they operate. The different projects and practices studied here, from the 1960s to the present, offer ways of thinking about the future that have spatial consequences in the built environment but reach into wider sociopolitical and ecological realms. What we can take from these practices and projects are lessons in how systemic change must guide design for the future, and how new spatial relations can support this change rather than circumscribe its parameters. As the various practitioners described in this essay prove, subverting systems from within is possible. And from that subversive first step, critical, imaginative, and projective steps can follow.