Systemic change in architecture moves slowly, or sometimes not at all. Much of the “PPP” (post-pandemic prognostication) about the profession has focused on implications for the near term, after what is hoped to be a short but probably severe recession. Le Corbusier once declared that “in every field of industry, new problems have presented themselves and new tools have been created capable of resolving them. If this new fact be set against the past, then you have revolution.” If the crises of 2020—economic, epidemiological, and social—are to really change architecture, it may take another decade. So the following is a brief speculative fiction about the practice of architecture, 2031.
Kimberly Sklarek closed her last holographic message and looked across the Inner Harbor of Baltimore from her office window. She stopped to think how things had changed in the eight short years since she had left Washington and set up her firm. That message, left by her newest client, was particularly satisfying: she had just won a major commission for a new social-services center in Minneapolis, and beaten corporate design giant RNO, her former firm, for the job.
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