Interviews conducted by Fred Bernstein, Chris Foges, Jenna McKnight, Josephine Minutillo, and Cliff Pearson.
Celebrating 125 Years: Looking Forward
Visions of the Future
A group of prominent architects discuss their forecasts for the decades ahead.
Click through the following slides to read some forward-looking thoughts from Patrik Schumacher, Odile Decq, David Adjaye, Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill, Bjarke Ingels, Alejandro Aravena, Tatiana Bilbao, Toshiko Mori, Díebédo Francis Kéré, Gregg Pasquerelli, Shohei Shigematsu, Jeanne Gang, Greg Lynn, Meng Yan, and Sou Fujimoto.
Patrik Schumacher | Zaha Hadid Architects, London
My phrase for the civilization we now live in is post–Fordist network society. Architecture needs to converge around ideas for this new era—the paradigm of parametricism—as it did around Modernism in the 20th century. We need to enhance the capacity of the discipline, not only in terms of technological sophistication, but also by taking a more scientific approach with respect to social processes.
Cities will be the superbrains of our civilization. Enhanced research-and-development activity means that people will have to network and communicate all the time, and so we will make cities that are dense, open, permeable, and mixed. Each building is a device that invites, structures, and frames interactions, and so the primary task of future architects will be communication design. At the same time, the division of labor into specialisms will continue. Architects will be in charge of the overall layout, aesthetic articulation, and semiology of a building, but they will distribute all technical elements to others, including engineers, programmers, and contractors.
If the core competency of architects is to translate the life process of an institution into space and form, and to make sure that the final product communicates as expected, architecture must develop a more sophisticated account of the built environment as a system of signification. For that, we need to upgrade the discipline’s intellectual capacity. Architectural theory will need greater rigor, like that found in economics or the social sciences, and it will need to flow more directly into the work of the practicing architect.
We will also see a greater role for artificial intelligence in the creation and operation of the built environment, and the emergence of responsive environments—intelligent buildings that can signal dynamically what is going on within. This expands the communicative potential of architecture, and also feeds hard data back into an enhanced disciplinary discourse. That will challenge a purely intuitive architectural approach. Architects need to keep pace with advances in knowledge; otherwise, they will lose responsibility. If the discipline of architecture is successfully upgraded, I foresee a growing demand for architectural skills, as design contributes an ever-greater part of a building’s value.
Photo © Matthew Joseph/Zaha Hadid Architects
Odile Decq | Studio Odile Decq, Paris
The way we practice architecture will be totally different in the future—not just because tools and contexts change, but because the young people studying today are absolutely different from my generation.
First, there are the number of women entering the profession. There are now more female students in architecture schools than men. This will alter the profession because women don’t manage their time, or relate to the client and architecture, in the same way as men. At the moment, there are not many women running offices, but in the next 25 years, they will be there.
Another factor is that today’s young people don’t want to be salaried employees. They want their own companies. They want to learn by doing, to be hands-on in making things. They are highly adaptable and think in terms of individuals and small groups’ sharing a platform. Big firms have to be very structured, like a machine, and we know that big machines are not efficient anymore. A two-person start-up can invent a new way of doing things. It has to happen in architecture.
In the school I founded, Confluence, I push the students to be entrepreneurial. That doesn’t mean they will necessarily build buildings. When you are educated in architecture, you are able to face very complex questions and work at many scales. It’s a unique way of thinking. We could apply it to many problems in commerce and society. Some companies are already involving writers, anthropologists, and philosophers to help them to think differently and evolve their business. Why not architects?
Photo courtesy Studio Odile Decq
David Adjaye | Adjaye Associates, London
We face a new challenge as architects, learning who will be in the driver’s seat in the shaping of our cities as they evolve. The private sector has jumped into what formerly were the arenas of the government and local authorities. For example, we’re at the edge of seeing how transportation and infrastructure will change over the next 25 years. It most certainly will not look the way it does now. One area that will need policy and will not be led by the private sector is housing. As urban populations explode, we have to get ahead of housing.
Incredible things are right at our doorstep, and they will have a powerful impact on urbanism and architecture. We’re on the precipice of reimagining the city and how it serves its citizens. This offers opportunities for new typologies, and for being able to think in a more avant-garde way about what the public needs and how to maintain the identity of a city. This is going to be at the forefront of our agenda.
Photo © Ed Reeve
Adrian Smith and Gordon Gill | Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, Chicago
In terms of tall buildings, there will always be people who will want to go higher. We are reaching a point, however, where it is economically unfeasible, despite being technically possible. Our firm has designed a mile-high tower that could get built, but it probably will be a losing financial proposition.
While supertall towers often become national symbols, their value extends beyond their country’s borders. Eventually the whole industry benefits from what we’ve learned. Take glass, for instance. We can now build glass walls that are stronger than concrete block. And while we were at Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, we designed a positive-energy building, the Pearl River Tower, which would have produced more energy than it consumed, but the Chinese power grid was not capable of accepting the power generated by the building. Someday, that won’t be the case.
Photos courtesy Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture
Bjarke Ingels | Bjarke Ingels Group, Copenhagen & New York
The technological revolution that has propelled Silicon Valley is almost exclusively focused on the virtual world. Looking ahead, I think we will see more advances in the physical realm, from driverless cars to solar infrastructure to new building materials that could totally transform architecture.
Already, nanotechnology is giving us a handful of carbon materials with almost magical properties. Take graphene, which is a monofilament carbon material that is 200 times more conductive than copper, 100 times stronger than steel, and more transparent than glass. It’s even potentially abundant. It’s just becoming available at the manufacturing level, and I believe it will become commercially available within a decade. It’s so much better than anything we know today. It can be used to create completely transparent window photovoltaics, and spans and dimensions that seem like magic. Nanotechnology gives us possibilities that we could only dream about.
We will also see 3-D printing at an industrial scale. Computer programs have enabled architects to design with great precision and complexity, but at the end of the day, designs have to get built. When 3-D printing becomes fully commercially available, it will create amazing new opportunities. Instead of having to schlep a lot of materials to a site, you will bring a handful of printers and print the building components, all of which will be incredibly strong. Any architectural form will be not only possible but also financially feasible.
I foresee architects’ getting more involved in the “back of house” aspects of a city too—all the infrastructure that makes a city work. There is still a divide in the built environment: building types that are “deserving” of architecture—like cultural venues, corporate headquarters, and luxury condos—but what about the power plants, the waste-management facilities, the water-purification plants, the parking garages, the highways? All of those are seen as engineering challenges, with little thought put toward how to integrate them into the urban environment. These facilities can make a positive contribution to a city. One of our current projects, a power plant in Copenhagen, will have an alpine ski park on its roof. It will open in 2017. We are very interested in finding ways to turn infrastructure into a positive contribution to the urban landscape.
Photo © Steven Voss/Bjarke Ingels Group
Alejandro Aravena | Elemental, Santiago, Chile
We are living in an urban age. People are moving to cities for opportunities for jobs, education, health, and other basic services. And cities have the critical mass for knowledge creation, something that will be more crucial in the development and formation of wealth in the broadest sense of the word.
The problem is what we call the “3S menace”: the scale, speed, and scarcity of means with which to respond to this phenomenon. There is no historical precedent. Out of the 3 billion people living in cities today, 1 billion are under the line of poverty. By 2030, out of an anticipated 5 billion city dwellers, 2 billion will be under the poverty line. That means we will have to build a 1 million-population city per week over the next 15 years.
If we don’t solve this equation, people will not stop coming to cities. They will come, but will live in awful conditions. The result will be a humanitarian and health crisis rife with social friction—a crisis that will become in the midterm, if not the short-term, a security threat. We do not have enough knowledge to solve the 3S menace. Even if we had the tools to solve it, we would end up creating an environmental crisis.
The carbon footprint, the water consumption, and the undesired emissions to build for 1 million people a week, using current building techniques, will end our planet.
President Obama and U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, have said that the future terrorist threat will be the consequence of climate change. The 3S menace is an environmental, political, and social problem. And it’s a problem for everybody, not just the developing world.
Thanks to design’s power of synthesis, architects have the opportunity to translate into form all of the conflicting forces at play and provide solutions for the complexity of contemporary society. In front of these challenges, we need to be creative enough to identify strategic opportunities and translate them into proposals and projects of public space, public transport, multitask infrastructure, open incremental housing. With good design, the involvement of patient capital—that looks for predictability more than profitability—and the right rule of law could turn cities into a vehicle of development.
These issues are difficult—and difficult questions require professional quality, not professional charity.
Photo courtesy Elemental
Tatiana Bibao | Tatiana Bilbao Estudio, Mexico City
Architecture has the tools to improve quality of life for real people, but only if we integrate the needs of real people into our work. The future needs to be more about the informal production of architecture, not architecture for architecture’s sake. Just as urbanism has to integrate the ways that cities grow organically, architecture has to integrate the ways real people decide to create their homes. I think a lot about alterity —which in architecture would mean integrating “others” into how we practice. There have been starts in that direction, but I haven’t seen anything that I think really nails it. I don’t think it’s easy. But I hope that it can happen. Otherwise, there’s no future for architecture. The profession will cease to exist.
Photo © Tatiana Bilbao Estudio
Toshiko Mori | Toshiko Mori Architect, New York
We had a client who ended up with less space than he originally thought he needed because the house we designed had expansive views and an amazing quality of daylight. The idea was to get closer to nature, to experience those external phenomena. And for that, what matters isn’t the quantity of space but the boundary condition, and open and flexible arrangements. With a better boundary condition, the space one actually occupies can be more intimate.
Throughout most of history, architecture has been about nature in opposition to the manmade environment. But there is a gradual shift with new technology and new attitudes that seek closer alliances. I have a theory that two 20th-century inventions changed our understanding of inside and outside. One was the X-ray, which made it possible to see inside the body, and the second was psychoanalysis, which allowed us to explore the internal mechanisms of our mind.
Since then, we have been trying to lessen the boundary between internal and external conditions. The idea and the degree of enclosure needed, both physically and psychologically, has changed. Now that we can do more with less material, with high-performance enclosures getting thinner and lighter, we can embrace natural elements. By incorporating natural ventilation and sunlight—by working with and not against the forces of nature—our buildings become more sustainable. These trends, of needing less space and less separation from nature, will continue as technology advances and our perception enlightens.
Photo © Toshiko Mori Architect
Diébédo Francis Kéré | Kéré Architecture, Berlin
Design that really serves—that is the most pressing issue architects should be concerned with in the next few decades. As our global population continues to grow, the need for high-quality but economical buildings will become even more critical. We need to create great architecture that serves humanity; we need to build with purpose. Architecture should inspire, it should evoke emotions. In a remote village, a beautiful building can help challenge people’s perception of what is possible. You give them inspiration and hope.
When working in underserved communities, we need to be careful that low-cost does not mean cheap. Architecture, whether in a city or a rural area, needs to last. I think one solution is to use more local materials in innovative ways. In my work, we are pioneering new methods for utilizing brick and other natural resources. By incorporating native materials, we cut down on transportation costs, support the local economy, and create architecture that has an authentic connection to its context. If you are constantly bringing in materials from faraway locations, you will never be able to meet the worldwide demand for high-quality and enduring shelter.
We always need to remember that good architecture takes time. It’s about learning local realities, studying climatic conditions, and then working with the community to create a successful design. In the African context, I cannot afford to be too quick or “fashionable.” If you take this approach, you will destroy more than you create, and communities will turn their backs on architecture. We should take care never to neglect the foundation of architecture: to serve humanity.
Photo © David Heerde/Kéré Architecture
Gregg Pasquerelli | SHoP Architects, New York
The practice of architecture is going to change. Architects will reverse slide from their specialization in aesthetics and reclaim their expertise in problem-solving. We will need to be broad-minded generalists, and firms will need to have a more expansive view of what architects can do. We can combine art and technology, and do it in a way that solves real problems.
Our firm is continuing to research what building a city means, and not forgetting the artistic side, while capitalizing on technology. How can we create areas with density, links to public transportation, spectacular public spaces, and an inclusiveness that embraces many kinds of people? How can we create higher-quality buildings, with better performance, that don’t cost an arm and a leg? The most sustainable thing is not an array of photovoltaics on the roof; it is a building people love and care about and don’t have to renovate every 20 years. If we can do all of this successfully, we can make a huge difference.
Photo courtesy Shop Architects
Jeanne Gang | Studio Gang, Chicago
We need to promote social connectivity in ways that will keep our cities safe and livable. I fear that with greater wealth disparity, we are losing connections between people who come from different walks of life. I’m optimistic that architecture can find ways to reconnect communities. To do that, architects will need to be more engaged with the public and will need to find ways for people to become active participants in designing their environments. Public engagement is not something we’re taught to do in architecture school, but we need to learn it.
We are also going to have to rethink our civic assets—including police stations, libraries, community centers, and even streets—and redefine what they are in order to get the most out of them. A library can become a place to get job assistance or mental-health services. A police station could also be a community center. We’re going to have to reinvent all of these things, and think of ways they can be networked together. A city that is more cohesive will be more resilient, even regarding climate change. When things start happening, we’re going to have to take care of each other. And to do that, we have to know each other.
Photo © Studio Gang
Shohei Shigematsu | OMA, New York
In the next 25 to 50 years, responding to food at its diverse scales and its different processes will catalyze new architectural typologies. Food is specific to livelihood, to the soil, and to culture—and yet it is also expansive and global. From large urban developments driven by food production to local cafeterias and home kitchens, food has the unique ability to be multi-scalar. It also goes through many stages, from planting to harvesting to processing and ultimately to waste, yet no comprehensive survey of this full food chain exists. I am leading a studio at the Harvard GSD that is investigating the intersection of food, architecture, and urbanism.
Photo © Geordie Wood
Greg Lynn | Greg Lynn Form, Venice, California
The future of architecture is figuring out what happens where the physical and the digital intersect. Buildings are becoming smarter and more networked. Yes, some of the “smart building” technology starts out benefiting the rich—as toys to entertain wealthy consumers—but it will eventually reach many more people.
I recently visited the Villa Tugendhat, in Brno. I went expecting to see really cool Mies. I found myself fascinated by the air conditioning. The whole facade of sliding glass disappears into the basement. The slot where it goes is a giant diffuser, and in the basement there’s a rudimentary cooling system, with these four bins of wildflowers. Throughout the day, cool air with different scents blows through the house. I was amazed at all the technology cooked up for this one family. Yes, it was superbourgeois, but that stuff trickles down eventually.
So buildings will change, in ways that no one can predict exactly. How buildings are delivered will change in ways I’m much more certain of. I’ve had the opportunity to work with the HoloLens, which are glasses that project augmented reality onto whatever you’re looking at. It’s not virtual reality, which I hate, but something much more useful. Put them on at a construction site, and you see what you’re supposed to be building. And as you move your head around, you’ll see it in 3-D. In a few years, construction sites will be paperless. The workers will be wearing goggles preloaded with information provided by the architects. I’d bet the farm on it.
Photo © Hello Design/Greg Lynn Form
Meng Yan | URBANUS, Shenzhen, China
I’m always hesitant to predict the future. We see the future best from the perspective of history. Looking at China, I think there are still lots of opportunities. Every second- and third-tier city here wants to be Shenzhen, to grow very fast. But we’re using the same set of tools to plan our cities that we did 25 years ago. We need new methodologies. Instead of building new cities, though, we should go back and rebuild the ones we have. I’d like to see the new city built on top of the existing one.
Architects must change too. Traditionally, we would wait to get a commission and then provide a service. There are other ways to practice, though. We can go out and find our projects—research where we live and work, and find problems that require solutions. This means identifying key moments where we can intervene and make a difference. It means actively engaging with our cities. Right now URBANUS is working with a community in Shenzhen that is being threatened by development. It’s actually a 500-year-old village in the middle of a city that everyone says is just 36 years old. It has been there for hundreds of years, changing all the time, and is now surrounded by a giant new city. We used social media to reach out to people living in this urban village, as well as to architects, planners, and researchers. It’s very powerful. We couldn’t have done this five years ago.
People in China continue to move from the countryside to the cities. But a lot of work needs to be done in rural areas. The countryside has always nurtured our culture; it’s where our poets, painters, and philosophers went to find inspiration. In the Confucian system of governance, smart kids from the countryside would take the exams, go to the cities for education, and get posts in different places. But they always came back to the countryside. We need to do that again—to bring people back to the villages, not just as tourists, but to live there and contribute.
Photo courtesy Urbanus
Sou Fuijimoto | Sou Fujimoto Architects, Tokyo
In the future, biotechnology will allow us to blur the line between the natural and the man-made. I can imagine structures that are half grown and half built. We could not say that buildings contain plants, because buildings and plants would grow together: the process of building and growing would be fundamentally the same. I think this would completely change our understanding of architecture. This is my dream.
Photo © David Vintiner/Sou Fujimoto Architects
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