2024-11-07T19:53:27-05:00 https://archinect.com/news/article/100054708/real-estate-and-the-responsibility-of-architects Places Journal 2014-05-19T13:44:00-04:00 >2014-05-28T20:57:25-04:00 <img src="https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/l3/l3kl944xsizud6fm.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=1200" border="0" /><em><p>To sever instances of &ldquo;architecture&rdquo; from the deaths of indentured construction workers on a building site in Qatar, or from the property lines measured out at Twin Lakes, is an elemental act, comparable to flushing a toilet, turning on the water, or switching on a light... Understanding these infrastructures, and contesting their hegemony with that knowledge, is therefore as basic as it gets.</p></em><br /><br /><p>For the 2014 Venice Architecture Biennale, curator Rem Koolhaas has chosen as his theme "fundamentals," meaning the "inevitable elements of all architecture ... the door, the floor, the ceiling, etc." To this list Reinhold Martin proposes Fundamental #13: real estate, the land itself, without which "all the rest is inconceivable." He then asks difficult questions about architects' complicity in the uses to which land is put by the "transnational, translocal, global and otherwise border-violating and border-producing system of real estate."</p>