At the 2016 AIA convention, the legendary architect gave the profession an honest appraisal of its failures.
I did not make it to the AIA Convention in Philadelphia this year, so I missed the talk with Rem Koolhaas; but I read this short summary today and not surprisingly found some kernels of relevance worth keeping in mind. Worth the 4-minute read if you want to understand some of the problems thoughtful architects have in today’s practice.
We’re working in a world where so many different cultures are operating at the same time each with their own value system. If you want to be relevant, you need to be open to an enormous multiplicity of values, interpretations, and readings.
“Architecture stands with one leg in a world that’s 3,000 years old and another leg in the 21st century. This almost ballet-like stretch makes our profession surprisingly deep. You could say that we’re the last profession that has a memory, or the last profession whose roots go back 3,000 years and still demonstrates the relevance of those long roads today. Initially, I thought we were actually misplaced to deal with the present, but what we offer the present is memory.”