It may already be out of our hands: the fate of civilization and even our human destiny. Can we still salvage what is about to escape us? Is there still time to change course?
By whatever means, we don’t have much time left for reasserting our agency. As we continue to borrow from the future or, in harsher words, to steal from the next generations, the thread of life is being stretched to breaking point.
What could save us?
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Not long ago talking about imminent collapse was ridiculed as doomsdayism. Today it is no less than a matter of fact. There is profound concern about indefensible global injustice. There is anxiety about the encroaching grip of algorithmic intelligence on our lives. But we are close to certainty about the planetary consequences of our worsening overshoot condition. We are now almost permanently exceeding our planet’s ability to regenerate the essentials for human life: climate, biodiversity, and our natural resources.
till Earth Overshoot Day 2025
Clearly, our “time is out of joint”, and we are in dire need of balance before we sleepwalk into catastrophe. And to achieve balance we need a strong sense of measure. Measure is the opposite of excess, it’s the safeguard against abuse. In fact, grasping the right measure is the result of a prolonged effort to improve oneself. It is the key attribute, as well as benefit, of character.
For individuals, a sense of measure can express itself in many ways, under the influence of different value systems. But if there is one overarching, comprehensive and almost timeless modality of finding measure that all humanity can perfectly understand, it is architecture – the art of organizing our life in space and time... measuredly.
So, instead of focusing on a change of leadership as the obvious avenue of change, let me discuss what architecture and design can do. Given its historical track record, it might be more than you think.
Why has architecture over the centuries merited this status as the embodiment of measure and balance, acquiring the reputation of being a metaphor for world order itself? It must be because there is no operation of the human mind that needs to factor in more parameters of life, or that allows more human and natural dimensions to be part of the equation, within the single synthetical act of creating and framing situations and events happening in our lives. It is the most all-encompassing medium for reconciling, combining and synthesizing virtually everything that exists. Most importantly perhaps: it galvanizes intention into result.
Architecture, defined in this way, is clearly not just a profession delivering a service. It is the way humanity touches base with itself. That is why it has survived for thousands of years. That is why, in its best manifestations, it has been the work of polymaths and boundlessly curious people who never stop seeking to understand more. As long as there are human beings and their challenges, there will be architecture. Therefore, architecture is obviously too important to leave solely to architects. It is both our meter and our clock. We measure our lives with architecture. From the toddler building a sandcastle on the beach, to the dying person’s enjoyment of a ray of light coming through a window, we appreciate life with and through architecture. Good design makes you love life. And we can all be designers.
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So, how can architecture, as our profoundly human endeavor, help us to rediscover our sense of measure and battle excess and abuse? Surely not by accepting what today is defined as architecture by the people who claim it as their territory. Architecture as the art of measure has been completely forgotten by a building practice that, despite some singular efforts to counter it, is still largely adding to ecological and moral overshoot. The same is true of its discourse which continues to overshadow common sense. Current architectural practice privileges a frenzied production of new projects, new reputations and new events, restlessly crisscrossing the globe for opportunities to excel. Recently, it took a global pandemic to temporarily impose a quantitative limit. But what fundamental shift could create a qualitative limit as a quality in itself?
Why has architecture lost its cultural prerogative to demonstrate and leverage human agency and be the ultimate medium of human purpose?
See how it lost ground by becoming entwined with human ego.
- Egotecture, 1997
Egotecture was an exhibition at the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1997. Invited by museum director Chris Dercon, I received access to the vast collection and prepared an exhibition-essay about the last 500-year history of space concepts, intertwined with the history of human self-awareness, and their mutual influences. The exhibition was based on my doctoral thesis The Rise and Fall of the Self, which had led to two degrees in Cultural and Architectural History at the University of Amsterdam in 1990.The exhibition was designed as a journey, beginning with the Renaissance, through half a millennium of discovering, mastering, reflecting and speculating on the idea of personal space, and eventually getting lost in it. This story was interwoven with an equally long history of the self-portrait, showing how human beings pursued the idea of a self from curiosity, through mastery, to alienation and even oblivion.Images of the exhibition can still be recovered, but a selection of works that were on show, as well as an introductory statement, can be viewed on the project page.
Why did architecture become star-struck, losing its connection with the civilizational project?
See how it fell into the abyss of rhetoric.
- The Invisible in Architecture, 1994
The Invisible in Architecture was a project, initiated jointly with fellow architecture student Roemer van Toorn, that began as a lecture series at the TU Delft in 1987-8 and culminating in a book which appeared in London in 1994. Throughout its duration, the project was fueled by dissatisfaction with the growing icon and celebrity culture that emphasizes image over substance. The title, The Invisible in Architecture, was a call to keep paying attention to architecture’s mission to provide inspiration and be a medium for human agency to take care of our life world. The book interrogates the work of the most famous contemporary architects for its cultural depth and relevance for society. Remarkably, most of these architects are, a quarter of a century later, still famous.
Why did architecture surrender to the digital, giving up the role of protagonist of truth to one of ‘information’?
See how it became weaker than software.
- RealSpace in QuickTimes, 1996
RealSpace in QuickTimes (and the ensuing series of articles QuickTime in RealSpace), entailed a comprehensive project investigating the subjugation (and potential resurrection) of architecture in the wake of ubiquitous digitization. In 1996, I had curated the Dutch pavilion for the Triennale di Milano, showcasing the potential of integrating architectural craftsmanship with digital design and production techniques, as well as with digital art forms such as soundscaping and visual computer animations. An accompanying book featured a substantial essay describing the many repercussions of digital technology for an art form still completely grounded in an analogue way of thinking. Another pavilion, conceived for Cultural Capital of Europe 2001, explored the new spatial experiences in store once architecture becomes entirely information- and time-based. The project concluded that architecture was incapable of absorbing the digital and that its own inclination was to be absorbed by cyberspace itself, while limiting its status as a construction industry or “built environment”.
Clearly, architecture has drifted away from its true potential to be the medium of balance and the measure of our existence. It has no substantial discourse, let alone a design for remedying social injustice. It doesn’t provide strategies to protect us from ubiquitous and invasive technology. And most existentially, in its current guise it doesn’t help us to cap global warming to a maximum of 1.5⁰C. Not even to the absolutely necessary 2⁰C.
Pick up this planet in peril
