“I think architecture is in a sort of crisis,” he says. “We’ve lost our social purpose. What we are seeing now is construction as a product of investment. We are building a lot, but we are building big investment projects, as if we’re doing architecture without architecture. It’s more about investment than it is about urbanism. We used to be involved in planning and building cities, building societies. But now we are discussing housing as if it were a strange product like washing machines [...] — Financial Times
In Jan Dalley's FT piece, the soft-spoken British architect expresses his concerns about architecture as a mere tool of the free market, the shrinking role of architects as society builders, and why we are building "horrible cities."
3 Comments
meanwhile patrick schumacher: "housing is in a crisis because of not enough free market capitalism."
I feel like the word "Crisis" gets thrown around in architecture so often that it's starting to lose its meaning a little bit...
There's a crisis in the architectural vocabulary!
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