Archinect - News

'Despair is useless': Mike Davis reflects on California, the climate crisis, life, and legacy as he faces his own mortality

2022-09-13T18:44:00-04:00

I’ve seen miracles happen. I’ve seen ordinary people do the most heroic things. When you’ve had the privilege of knowing so many great fighters and resisters, you can’t lay down the sword, even if things seem objectively hopeless.

The terminally-ill City of Quartz author sat down recently with The Guardian to discuss his waning health and look back at prescient early warnings of the state’s slow-motion social and ecological demise that has taken three decades to manifest. True to form, Davis was critical of everything: from “fascist” LA novelist Raymond Chandler to Governor Gavin Newsom’s penchant for arrogating his administration’s response to the climate crisis that has been exacerbated by even increasingly harmful and foolhardy attempts to mitigate the housing crisis in Los Angels and other non-urban areas across the state.

Related Feature Interview on Archinect: Meeting Mike Davis

“Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future,” he said. “A small group of people have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, and they have no vision, no strategy, no plan. It’s not just global warming, and drought, it’s the fact that two...

UK architectural educators urge: "Join us in using the freedom and particular responsibility of academic institutions to push our discipline" to address the global ecological crisis

2019-08-14T13:07:00-04:00

We are concerned that at present our education does not give sufficient weight to the inherently ecological and political basis of architecture, nor to our responsibility to meet our uncertain future with socially and environmentally informed practice. We appreciate and applaud the efforts of contemporary practitioners, but we ask you to join us in using the freedom and particular responsibility of academic institutions to push our discipline further in this direction.

Over 1,663 academics, professors, and administrators, mostly from the United Kingdom, have signed on to an open letter aimed at the architectural community that calls for a "curriculum change" in how architectural educators view their positions relative to the ongoing ecological crisis.

The letter, among other things, compels educators to push national and international certification bodies to "centralise the social and technical dimensions of ecological breakdown in their practices and requirements, and to expand their policies to confirm that failing to engage with ecological breakdown is acting counter to the public interest."

In addition, the declaration asks educators to "conduct annual environmental policy reviews, so that our schools may lead by example, integrating the highest standards in our own policies, divesting from damaging industries such as arms manufacturing and fossil fuels, and exploring new options for positive carbon and ecological contribution."

The effort c...

Now that the feds have abandoned reality, enter this competition to keep the SF Bay Area from flooding

2017-01-26T15:13:00-05:00

Prompted by the success of a similar competition it ran in New York several years ago, The Rockefeller Foundation has launched a completely Ben-Carson-HUD-free contest that challenges architects and urban planners to "imagine climate change solutions" for the San Francisco Bay Area. Opening for submissions in April, "The Bay Area: Resilient by Design Challenge" will have two phases. According to NextCity:

In the first, teams will participate in a three-month “exploratory research and community engagement period to develop initial design concepts for specific sites,” according to the release. The second will be a “collaborative five-month intensive design phase” in which teams will work with residents, businesses, community-based organizations and local politicians. Because three Bay Area cities (Oakland, San Francisco and Berkeley) are already part of another climate change adaptation effort, Rockefeller's 100 Resilient Cities, the two projects will collaborate.

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Frei Otto feared society was ignoring the ecological crisis

2015-05-20T20:36:00-04:00

The daughter of the man who was awarded what is considered the most prestigious prize in architecture said her late father was increasingly concerned society was not adequately confronting the looming ecological challenges. Frei Otto, a German, was named as the winner of the 2015 Pritzker Architecture Prize earlier this year, just days before his death... The award was received by...the architect’s daughter who...said he had been worried that the concerns he tried to voice were not heard.