Packaging designs aimed at boosting recycling rates and reducing the prevalence of single-use plastics are destined to fail unless they help to change people's behaviour, writes Matt Millington.

No one is particularly happy when they find out there's plastic waste on Mount Everest, or in the deep oceans, or in human blood. It's not controversial to say that we need to stop churning the stuff out and throwing it away.

One way for businesses to tackle single-use plastics is to design their packaging to be reusable, but so far efforts have not succeeded at scale.

For example, reusable McDonald's cups are only getting a 40 per cent return rate from customers in Germany, despite consumers paying a €2 deposit. When Starbucks trialled reusable cups in the closed environment of its Seattle HQ, where returning them is presumably straightforward, the return rate still didn't exceed 80 per cent.

We weren't exactly succumbing to dehydration on the streets before coffee shops designed takeaway cups

It's not that we don't care: research suggests consumer motivation towards environmentally positive behaviour is high. It's that as a society we have developed an expectation of convenience: to have what we want, when we want it, without any consequences.

This is entirely unreasonable – we weren't exactly succumbing to dehydration on the streets before coffee shops designed takeaway cups – but while it persists, consumers are very unlikely to switch to reusable alternatives if it puts them out. And without a high return-and-reuse rate, reusable packaging is usually worse for the environment, owing to the much higher quantities of plastic involved.

This is why we need to design for human behaviour if we're ever to get rid of single-use plastics. You cannot control what people will do with packaging once it leaves your premises, but you can influence them by factoring behavioural psychology into the design of the packaging itself.

The first step is understanding how consumers interact with the pack, throughout its lifecycle. Where are they and what are they doing when they open it? What's their headspace? How about when they're finished with it? There's a big difference between how someone interacts with a reusable plate after a meal in a cafeteria, and how they interact with the reusable salad bowl they're gobbling from on the lunchtime rush back to the office.

Then it's about understanding the levers you can pull to nudge people towards more planet-positive decisions. Behavioural psychology shows there are three factors that work together to drive behavioural change: increasing consumer motivation to recycle or reuse, raising their ability to do so, and providing a trigger to remind them.

Take plastic bags. While usage of single-use bags has dramatically decreased in the UK since legislation requiring retailers to charge for them came into force in 2015, reusable alternatives have had mixed success. According to a report by the Environmental Investigation Agency and Greenpeace, 57 "bags for life" were sold for each household in the country in 2019 – more than one a week.

It's possible to go too far in signalling that a pack isn't disposable

Online grocer Ocado uses recyclable bags instead, but it has had success in achieving returns because it pulls all three behavioural psychology levers. Consumers are happy to receive bonus reward points for each bag they give back (motivation).

The bags are straightforward to return and customers know not to throw them away because of their clear messaging and distinct off-grey colour, which follows from not using harmful bleaching agents (ability). And because the driver usually asks for old bags after delivery, they're unlikely to forget (trigger).

Ability is the key consideration. If you wanted to return the packaging from a takeaway burger meal, it would mean washing and then carrying around a bulky burger box, fries box and cup, and either making a special trip to the restaurant or waiting until you happen upon another branch.

New Zealand start-up FOLDPROJECT has done some interesting work here, trying to make boxes more portable. It's a simple idea: a machine-washable lunch kit that packs down to a flat sheet. The challenge is that because it is so minimal, its form and material make it look disposable.

One way to ensure a reusable design communicates its intended purpose is through material choice. For example, using explicitly post-consumer recycled plastic could be a visual shorthand to communicate a planet-positive intent, as could using longer-lasting materials like glass or stoneware.

Interestingly, it's possible to go too far in signalling that a pack isn't disposable. When McDonald's introduced reusable packaging in its restaurants in France, it found the packaging kept disappearing, only to reappear on eBay. It looked reusable and on-brand, but was too novel for some, defeating the object.

So long as we have bins on every street that lead directly to landfill, we are going to struggle

Businesses cannot just switch to reusable packaging – even when intelligently designed – and expect results. So long as we have bins on every street that lead directly to landfill we are going to struggle.

We therefore need to think beyond just designing the packaging to be sustainable, and think about how we design systems to be sustainable. In a circular economy that means service and experience design, packaging, industrial design, marketing, data, artificial intelligence and logistics all working hand-in-hand to keep the pack "in the loop". It will therefore need to be an ecosystem effort.

We're already seeing innovations that can help make reuse and return viable in the age of convenience. For example, when is a bin not a bin? When it's a Bjarke Ingels Group-designed TURN system – a remote, digitally connected, RFID-enabled, packaging-asset reclaim and sorting network, which rejects unwanted trash.

Similarly, we're seeing nudge messaging along the pack journey, and even packs that communicate their status themselves. Scottish start-up Insignia has designed colour-changing labels that reveal how long a pack has been exposed to the environment. Imagine taking this further, with reusable packaging telling you what to do with it, and offering prompts or rewards to encourage you.

Reusability hasn't hit scale yet, but we should be optimistic that it can, not least because we've been there before. Milk deliveries were once the norm, with bottles returned, not discarded.

There's no reason that we can't get back to this more sustainable approach across the board, without having to endure too much inconvenience. All that's required is a little ingenuity, and a lot of collaboration.

The photography is by Jas Min via Unsplash.

Matt Millington is a sustainable-design strategist at PA Consulting.

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Climate fatalism stands in the way of a sustainable future but designers and architects are in an ideal position to overcome it, writes Katie Treggiden.

The mainstream media is finally waking up to the realities of climate change. As wildfires, floods and storms wreak havoc across the world, journalists and activists far braver than me are speaking truth to power to make sure we all know just how serious this thing is. And that is vital and right and proper.

However, fear doesn't motivate action. The biggest obstacle for the environmental movement is no longer climate-change deniers – the evidence is incontrovertible to all but conspiracy theorists. It is those who are fully on board with the fact that humans are the root cause of some very real problems, but just don't believe that we have what it takes to solve them. Our biggest climate challenge is no longer denial, but despair.

Fear doesn't motivate action

To spark meaningful change, we need hope. We need to believe not only that a better world is possible, but that we each have the power to help bring it about.

I'm not talking about blind faith or passive optimism. I'm talking about active hope. I'm talking about waking up every morning and making a choice to believe that we can solve this wicked problem, and then choosing to act accordingly. And in today's climate – political, economic and social as well as environmental – hope is an act of defiance.

So, how can architects and designers inspire defiant hope?

The Berkana Institute's "two loops" model of systems change proposes multiple roles that people and institutions can play in the transition from a declining system to an emerging one. As the dominant system begins its decline, "stabilisers" keep what is required in place until something better is ready, while "hospice workers" support the process of decline, minimising harm to those still within it.

In turn, the emergent system gathers pace as "pioneers" come up with new ideas, products and systems and they are joined together into networks by "connectors". Together, they form supportive "communities of practice" that enable them to grow their influence and, eventually, rise up to replace the old system.

In the transition from the declining linear take-make-waste economy to an emerging regenerative and circular economy, we might cast architects and designers in the role of "pioneers" – problem-solvers who can create pragmatic ways to move society towards a better world.

And that is valid; if architecture and design solve problems, then surely they should contribute genuine, impactful, and replicable solutions to arguably the biggest problem ever to have faced humanity.

In today's climate – political, economic and social as well as environmental – hope is an act of defiance

However, I believe they can also play another part. On the emerging-system loop, there is a role for "illuminators": people who paint a picture of what a better world might look like.

You see, there is no point in the model where the two loops touch, no simple juncture where people can step off one system and onto the next – they must take a leap of faith. Illuminators are the people who can give them the courage to do that.

One of the questions I get asked most often when I speak at conferences about craft and design in the transition to a circular economy is: "Okay, but how does it scale?"

Firstly, I would contend that scalability is what got us into this mess, and what we need instead are locally replicable solutions, but increasingly I am questioning whether everything we propose as an industry even needs to do that. Perhaps part of our role is simply to inspire hope – defiant, stubborn, active hope.

Kyloe Design's kelp chair, showcased recently as part of Green Grads at the London Design Festival, may never make it into production and it's highly unlikely that it will drive the wholesale replacement of leather across the furniture industry. But it does showcase the potential of this incredibly renewable, climate-positive, underutilised material, while provoking the curiosity to learn more.

From responsible material sourcing and advocating for worker welfare to using smartphone components anyone can switch out, Fairphone is offering real-world solutions. But its founder, Bas Van Abel, was realistic about what he could achieve directly, so launched the company with the stated aim of motivating the rest of the industry.

There is little doubt that his efforts have had a hand in both the incoming EU legislation that will require smartphone batteries to be "easily replaceable" and the recent launch of a repairable Nokia phone.

Part of our role is simply to inspire hope – defiant, stubborn, active hope

Zaha Hadid Architects principal Patrik Schumacher might have criticised the "lack of architecture" at last year's Venice Architecture Biennale, but what if contributions such as the German pavilion (pictured), which he described as nothing more than "piles of construction material", are exactly what we need to inspire alternative ways of working? Entitled Open for Maintenance, the exhibition was billed as "an action framework for a new building culture" and collated materials recovered from previous installations to be used for repairing and upgrading buildings and public spaces all over Venice.

One of my favourite quotes about hope is from the author Arundhati Roy, who says: "Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing." The question I would like to pose is: how can we, as an industry, help everyone to hear the sound of her breath?

Katie Treggiden is the founder and director of Making Design Circular, a membership community and online-learning platform for sustainable designers and makers, and the author of Broken: Mending and Repair in a Throwaway World (Ludion, 2023).

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Interior design must begin facing up to uncomfortable truths about our planet and health in 2024, Michelle Ogundehin writes in her annual trends report for Dezeen.

This must be the year of truth. It's no time to be distracted by talk of trends, new or latest looks. The tactic of holding facts at arm's length has only enabled denial, obfuscation, and fakery, as well as cauterising our moral obligation to change. Mark Twain aptly summarises our current malaise with the pithy: "What gets us into trouble is not what we don't know, it's what we know for sure that just ain't so."

Thankfully, the zeitgeist is shifting. We see it in current TV programming, ever a prescient reflection of public mood. Consider Channel 4's punchy The Great Climate Fight, which volubly charges the British government with incompetence, to ITV's Mr Bates vs The Post Office, dramatising the scandalous lies behind a huge miscarriage of justice.

It's no time to be distracted by talk of trends, new or latest looks

The desire for unvarnished veracity is there in Netflix's new tranche of documentaries. Think Robbie Williams: Behind the Scenes and its Jeffrey Epstein exposé. Even Disney's Wagatha Christie vehicle was about truth-telling.

It reflects the shattering of any persistent facade that everything's just fine. In the face of extreme weather patterns – from tornados in Manchester in the north of England to record-breaking monsoons in Pakistan – and the escalating rates of chronic disease, anxiety, depression, loneliness epidemics, and other mental-health disorders seen worldwide, surely, finally, our eyes are opening?

In case not, here are a couple of truths that we may need to be reminded of.

One: the perpetual quest for economic growth is unsustainable on a finite planet, yet it prevails because we've been hoodwinked into believing that better always means newer, faster, or more. We are entreated to consume for the good of the economy – the work-to-spend cycle. The implication being that if we don't, we're responsible for mass unemployment and the failure of honest businesses.

Ergo, consumer-driven economies are routinely prioritised over basic citizen welfare, and material goods have become proxies for our dreams and aspirations, even our expressions of love.

Two: the environments in which we live are increasingly toxic – physically, socially, and mentally. Yet we're reneging on personal responsibility for our wellbeing with the misguided assumption that big industry would never create products dangerous to human health, and that our healthcare providers are there to patch us up if they do. We need to focus on causes and prevention instead of lucrative (but futile) searches for cures for diseases like cancer.

It wasn't so long ago that the desire to exercise, seek wellbeing, or be social were reasons to leave the home

What's tricky is that potential solutions to the above don't wash well with legislators or many politicians because they appear slow, unduly restrictive, difficult, or inconvenient. Immediate results (i.e. within a single term of office) are seldom forthcoming, thus a stance of head-in-the-sand, or a default to fast fixes, becomes entrenched as the go-to action.

And yet, research suggests that we, the people, feel differently. According to the 10th annual Life at Home report produced this year by IKEA (one of the world's largest home surveys, encompassing the views of 37,428 people aged 18-plus across 38 countries), searches for "slow living" have doubled since 2015.

So where does this leave us?

We're being pushed and pulled in many contradictory directions. It wasn't so long ago that the desire to exercise, seek wellbeing, or be social were reasons to leave the home. Now these activities all happen within the same four walls.

This creates many tensions. Should our domestic caves be linked to the world via the latest high-tech gizmos, or be our deliberate respite from the techno-frazzle? How do we square a wish for personal privacy with the sensation of living in more open spaces? Can we work from home without feeling like we live at work?

It was no surprise to me that Squishmallows were the hit toy of 2023. These soft, malleable cute-character cushions are acutely comforting to hold. Even the revered investor Warren Buffet now has the company in his portfolio. They are a potent symbol of a need.

In response, the popular press touts voluminous La-Z-Boy-style recliners as the next big thing, but is an inducement to lounge ever further into denial really what's called for?

Our ability to thrive must become the guiding principle for all design

Humans are the ultimate adaptors, but we require stimulus to learn and grow, if not an element of discomfort. While your genes may load the gun, your environment pulls the trigger. Currently, for many, that's somewhere hyperconnected yet also physically disconnected, temperature-controlled and sedentary.

Align this with the current cult of convenience – that which enhances personal comfort or advantage over everything else, and therein lies the downward spiral.

We must abandon the ordered, rational, learned good taste and comfort that we've become used to in favour of something more instinctive and rugged. Less a singular design aesthetic than a profoundly sensory desire to touch, smell and feel intensely. It is the personal over the predictable. The umami in the dish. The idea that owes its genus to a singular moment of unique creative vision, or innovation.

We must aim for a societal stability that does not rely on the continuous fetishisation of "novelty" to drive ever-increasing consumption if economic activity is to have a hope of remaining within ecological scale. Our ability to thrive must become the guiding principle for all design, if not perceptions of success.

Most importantly, we can no longer be afraid to speak or hear these truths, starting at home – the environment over which we have the most agency.

Here, then, are some final "home" truths that bear repeating.

Most homes are more polluted on the inside than a busy street corner outside due to the build-up of invisible toxins therein, yet we spend 90 per cent of our time indoors. Some examples: gas hobs leak benzene, a known carcinogen, even when they're off – this has been linked to one in eight cases of childhood asthma.

We have been living in a time of fantastical storytelling

Microplastics have been found in the placentas of unborn babies. Chemicals in everyday personal care products can cause chronic hormonal disruption that leads to breast cancer. Chemical flame retardants legally mandated for use on your upholstery increase smoke toxicity more than they reduce fire growth.

And Wi-Fi may not be as benign as you think. The World Health Organisation, in association with the International Agency on Cancer, formally classified electromagnetic field radiation (as emitted by Wi-Fi connected devices) as a Class 2B human carcinogen (potentially harmful to health) over a decade ago.

In summary, we have been living in a time of fantastical storytelling, fictions of delusional positivity that obscure the truth. Plato considered that truth is a correspondence between belief and reality. Time to wake up then if we are to stand a chance of survival, as our current reality almost beggars belief.

Michelle Ogundehin is a thought leader on interiors, trends, style and wellbeing. Originally trained as an architect and the former editor-in-chief of ELLE Decoration UK, she is the head judge on the BBC's Interior Design Masters, and the author of Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness, a guide to living well. She is also a regular contributor to publications including Vogue Living, FT How to Spend It magazine and Dezeen.

The photo, of a Kyiv apartment designed by Olga Fradina, is by Yevhenii Avramenko.

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Art Basel Miami and Design Miami should step up to help address the infuriating congestion that blights Miami art week, writes Ian Volner.

Several Miami art weeks ago, some marketing wiz at Uber got it into their head to launch a one-time-only promotional gimmick. During the annual culturefest in South Florida, app users could summon a branded motorboat service, ferrying themselves and a group of friends across Biscayne Bay in speedy, splashy style.

No longer. For the nearly 100,000 guests who descended on the Floridian city last month, as for the more or less coequal number of actual Miami Beach residents who had to put up with them, the means of getting in and out and around were as unglamorous as they were inconvenient.

Things are not much better during the regular working week in Magic City

But while Art Basel and Design Miami do make matters infinitely worse (one memorable carshare trip in December, from the Convention Center to the Design District, took this writer nearly an hour to cover a distance of five miles), things are not much better during the regular working week in Magic City.

Nor are they improving: according to infrastructure analytics firm Inrix, traffic in Miami-Dade jumped 30 per cent between 2021 and 2022. In the global congestion sweepstakes, the area now occupies the number eight spot worldwide, up from 32nd place just two years ago.

How did it happen? What's the way out? And why, for all the clout and cash that Art Basel and its attendant functions have helped attract to the city, have organizers and city leaders not found a way to make the fairs a part of the solution?

There aren't a lot of good answers, and fewer still short ones. But here's a quick, critical speedboat tour of Miami's ongoing transportation crisis.

Transit, for good and ill, has been key to the city's fortunes from the start – in particular for Miami Beach, separated from the mainland by about two-and-a-half miles of shallow water.

Carl Fisher, the resort community's early developer, launched his Miami Beach Railway in 1920. Running over the County (now MacArthur) Causeway, the trolley service was an essential prop to the beach town during its early years, the only alternative to the narrow automobile lanes alongside it and the rickety Collins Bridge (later the Venetian) to the north. Unfortunately, hurricanes and economic downturn spelled doom for the railroad, which closed in 1939.

It's easy to get caught at an open crossing, watching in mounting fury as a gleaming mega-yacht glides slowly past

By the time Miami started swinging again after the Second World War, auto-mania had seized the country. The MacArthur was widened, the Tuttle and Kennedy causeways soon joined it, and a state of semi-permanent gridlock slowly descended over the peninsula.

While the trans-bay bottlenecks constitute the better part of Miami's Basel-week woes, they represent only one part of the overall problem. Pressed up against the vast Everglades preservation area, the city proper is hemmed in and mass transit is sparse. There's a spur to the airport – though it requires connecting with a separate terminal train – and a steadily growing bike-share network, albeit with only six miles of protected paths to ride on, and some fairly aggressive drivers to contend with.

Then there's another uniquely Miamian vexation: with eight drawbridges scattered throughout downtown, it's easy to get caught at an open crossing, watching in mounting fury as a gleaming mega-yacht glides slowly past.

All these perils and more are presently being compounded by the most ominous threat facing the region: climate change. To the prospect of permanently swamped highways and side streets, local and state agencies have responded (as writer Sarah Miller reported in a memorable 2017 article) with "some pumps and raised roads" – but while conservative elected officials may laugh off the ecological danger, the social and economic effects of Miami's slow-motion infrastructure meltdown are already apparent.

While Florida as a whole has grown, the city has experienced a net decline in population since the pandemic, with 80,000 people leaving town between 2020 and 2022. High housing prices and limited employment opportunities have played a role, plainly, but both are tied inextricably to the transportation problem.

As local economic development group Opportunity Miami noted in an online brief, "Affordable housing that is far from jobs and schools can quickly turn unaffordable due to high transportation costs." A tale as old as time, to be sure, but seldom so well illustrated.

Some better fair-sponsored transit options would be a start; maybe a little creative thinking about programming

However halting and inadequate, some progress is being made. This year, the Florida state legislature enacted the new "Live Local" law, incentivizing developers to build denser, lower-cost housing. The initiative dovetails with Miami21, a citywide zoning ordinance that encourages transit-oriented development.

There's even talk of finally restoring rail service to the beach, via the same route used by old Carl Fisher over a century ago – although, notwithstanding the announcement in late 2022 that the Metromover system would be used for the expansion, some skepticism would seem in order. "Metrorail Projects Going Far Off Track", declared a Miami Herald headline, detailing the total lack of progress on a beach-city connection despite a voter-approved tax to fund it six years earlier. The article was published in 2008.

Interestingly, the very year that the transit referendum passed was the same that Art Basel Miami Beach first touched down at the Convention Center. It has now been more than two decades since then, and 18 years since Design Miami's debut, and yet the success of the fairs has not led to any notable attempts to remedy either the particular logistical hassles of fairgoers or the bigger issues at play in Miami.

This failure seems especially egregious in the case of Design Miami, an event that purports to bring together some of the best minds in architecture and product-making and which, with its regular appeals to environmentalism and social equity, might consider putting some of those values to work in its own backyard.

How? Well, some better fair-sponsored transit options would be a start; maybe a little creative thinking about when programming takes place and where, to try to cut down on the mad crosstown dash.

More importantly, the fairs could try to start a conversation among attendees, buyers and other bigwigs about the city's problems –even to suggest, however gently, that if municipal leadership won't take stern measures, the future viability of the fairs themselves could be in doubt.

It would not seem an idle threat: certainly not for anyone stuck on the causeway during the height of the festivities, praying for a motorboat or a miracle, and wondering why they ever came to Miami in the first place.

Ian Volner is a New York-based architecture, design and art critic whose writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Architectural Digest and The New Yorker among others. He is the author of several books, including the award-winning This Is Frank Lloyd Wright and The Great Great Wall: Along the Borders of History from China to Mexico.

The photo is by Phillip Pessar.

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Elon Musk's bulletproof Cybertruck represents a dystopian vision of America but exactly who it's intended for remains unclear, writes James McLachlan.

Outside of politics, few figures are as polarising in American life as Elon Musk. A hero to some owing to his perceived willingness to challenge progressive orthodoxies, for others he represents the worst of ego-driven toxic masculinity. Musk's latest venture, the gargantuan electric Cybertruck, is almost as polarising as the man himself.

The Cybertruck has been with us for a while now. When it launched in late 2019, some designers welcomed its stealth-bomber architecture, chiefly because the sharp angles punctured the soft, jelly-mould forms that dominate contemporary automotive design. Others likened it to a rebooted version of Giugiaro's origami form language, minus the depth or sophistication. Nevertheless, Musk, via his designer Franz von Holzhausen, had shaken things up.

The Cybertruck retains its killer-droid aesthetic – grim, impassive mask slashed by a single blade of light

At that point it was a concept car, where designers stretch the boundaries as far as they dare without being burdened by the feasibility of their thought experiments. In that context, the Cybertruck was just another provocation.

But Musk claimed his Pythagorean beast would make it to production. What's more, he claimed 250,000 customers had already signed up for one. All but the most ardent Elon fanboys were sceptical.

Then came the Covid-19 pandemic, which precipitated a global shortage of computer chips. The industry ground to a halt and few believed a production version of the Cybertruck would see the light of day.

But here it is and from a design perspective, remarkably little has changed. From the front, the Cybertruck retains its killer-droid aesthetic – grim, impassive mask slashed by a single blade of light. The windshield is greenhouse levels of big, served by a necessary, but nevertheless comically large single wiper.

The lighting signature repeats itself on a boxy rear that lacks definition. Other angles are more favourable – the folded body panels, unpainted 1.8-millimetre-thick cold-rolled stainless steel, are bent along straight lines rather than elaborate curves, creating dynamic angles. These pieces are simply bolted on to a two-piece subframe created by Tesla's vaunted Giga Press casting machine.

Virtually indestructible, these strong lines have saved Musk a small fortune in manufacturing costs. The truck is retailing at $60,000 for a base model, and though that is 10 grand more than first announced, it is still competitive. This understanding of the importance of design and manufacturing working together is Musk's genius.

But who is the Cybertruck for, exactly? Is it a lifestyle truck aimed at libertarian tech bros? A radical alternative to working vehicles from legacy automakers?

The ethical sheen that came with Tesla ownership has patinated

It is worth charting how we arrived at this point. In making electric cars that actually worked with Tesla, Musk was rewarded by Californian consumers who viewed themselves as more enlightened than those clinging to their gas-guzzling SUVs. Among the first customers was California design royalty Yves Behar, who owned an early Tesla prototype.

Tesla was the green face of car ownership, to the extent that some owners found themselves at the sharp end of a culture war in which climate-sceptic truck drivers would blast black soot all over their shiny paintwork: "rolling coal".

Perhaps these are the consumers that Musk is now courting with his self-declared war on progressive culture. Either way, the ethical sheen that came with Tesla ownership has patinated. Enterprising souls are selling bumper stickers disowning Musk (though not his car) to those who want the world to know they are still the good guys.

When the car world emerged from self-enforced isolation in 2022, it brought with it a hatful of concepts that tapped into ideas of escape. Audi and Lamborghini revealed jacked-up off-roaders, which evoked a desire to flee the cities in search of rural isolation and safety. The Cybertruck goes further, encapsulating a dystopian future vision where the United States is sliding into lawlessness.

For some, the unrest following the murder of George Floyd, which saw city centres across the US incinerated, confirmed Musk's bleak outlook. A mobile fortress complete with bulletproof glass and frightening levels of power was the logical defence.

Musk appeared on the Joe Rogan show, talking up the Cybertruck's "beast" mode. Precisely what this beast mode entailed was unclear, but footage emerged of Rogan firing an arrow at the window like a roided-up Robin Hood.

It could be that Musk has changed the game once again

With PR like this, it is hard to imagine a progressive Californian wanting to own one. But what about the prospect of stealing customers from the legacy brands like Ford and General Motors? Because when it really comes down to it, for truck owners capability is what counts. The most obvious rival is the tradcore Ford F-150 – the best-selling truck in the US and itself a colossus. Or the new Hummer, reinvented as an electric vehicle (EV) for eco-conscious fans of military-derived hardware.

Ford's flagship electric truck has a huge and versatile loading bay, a front trunk where the engine used to be, and can power your house should there be a power cut. So too, does the Cybertruck, but footage of the new pretender, wheels scabbling fruitlessly for traction on earthy terrain, has been shared gleefully across the internet.

Musk has been remarkably good at retaining a dedicated band of haters, so how true a picture this kind of footage paints of the Cybertruck's abilities is hard to say, but reviews from road-testers have been very favourable so far. It could be that Musk has changed the game once again, as he did with Tesla.

And then there is the climate question. The Cybertruck may be an EV, but given the sheer size of the thing it is hard to defend its eco-credentials. A car enthusiast, Joe Biden's vision for a decarbonised America partly focused on wholesale transition to battery power. Tax breaks to EV buyers reflected this, but also rigged the market.

What this mostly means in practice is electrified versions of existing products, which take a heavy toll on the planet. The Ford F-150 battery weighs the same as a Volkswagen Beetle. The Cybertruck is even heavier.

For years, the larger-than-life American boxing promoter Don King had a catchphrase that he rolled out when hyping up his latest show: "Only in America!" he would bellow. King understood better than most that in American society, relentless self-promotion is often enough to carry you through, regardless of substance.

But King also knew his audience better than anyone. We are about to find out how well Musk knows his.

James McLachlan is the editor of Car Design News. He is also a former editor of Icon and writer for Architects' Journal.

The photo is courtesy of Tesla Inc.

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Carlo Ratti's appointment as the next Venice Architecture Biennale director raises questions about how architecture's most important event will be impacted by Italy's far-right government, writes Catherine Slessor.

Just before Christmas, somewhat overlooked in the festive haze of tinsel and eggnog, it was announced that Italian architect and engineer Carlo Ratti has been appointed to be the next director of the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Ratti will helm the 19th iteration of the international architecture exposition in 2025, a responsibility that combines intellectual prestige with a strong whiff of poisoned chalice. The challenge is considerable: to steer and make sense of an unwieldy cultural juggernaut with the potential to burnish or upend reputations.

It's been over 20 years since the architecture biennale had an Italian director. Massimiliano Fuksas was the last Italian incumbent, presiding over "Less Aesthetics – More Ethics" in 2000. Prior to that, in the biennale's very early days, it was essentially an Italian old boys' club, with Aldo Rossi, Paolo Portoghesi and Francesco dal Co all taking turns.

Ratti would seem to represent a reversion to architecture's business-as-usual

But since Fuksas, the focus has been outwards, beyond Italy to the world. From the turn of the millennium, a roster of international luminaries, including Rem Koolhaas, Alejandro Aravena and Kazuyo Sejima, the first female director in 2010, have been invited to sprinkle stardust on proceedings.

Widely acknowledged to have taken the biennale in a new direction, Lesley Lokko's transformative and ambitious curatorial programme of 2023 was themed around Africa and its diaspora. Dismayingly, Ratti would seem to represent a reversion to architecture's business-as-usual, with more than a whiff of institutional sphincter clenching. The timing of the pre-Christmas announcement, as people wound down for the holidays, seemed more under-the-radar than usual.

Ratti's appointment must also be seen in the context of the biennale's wider relationship with Italian culture and politics. Last October, it was announced that right-wing journalist and public intellectual Pietrangelo Buttafuoco will succeed film producer Roberto Cicutto as overall biennale president, to oversee the individual art, architecture, dance, theatre, music and film festivals that constitute the world's oldest and largest cultural showcase.

Historically biennale presidents were feted for their skills in arts administration, but Buttafuoco is more known for his extreme political views. He is a former national leader of the youth wing of the Italian Social Movement (MSI), a party established by Giorgio Almirante, who was a minister in the government of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini.

As a journalist, Buttafuoco worked on assorted right-wing magazines and the then MSI newspaper, Il Secolo d’Italia. When once asked during an interview if he was a fascist he retorted enigmatically, "I am not a fascist. I am something else."

As an ideological ally of Italian prime minister Giorgia Meloni, now presiding over the country's most overtly right-wing government since the war, Buttafuoco will be tasked with addressing what Meloni's administration perceives to be the biennale's left wing proclivities.

Buttafuoco will be tasked with addressing what Meloni's administration perceives to be the biennale's left wing proclivities

Reacting to Buttafuoco's appointment, Raffaele Speranzon, a native of Venice and senator in Meloni's Brothers of Italy party, commented, "Another glass ceiling has been shattered. The left thought of the Biennale Foundation as a fiefdom where it could place friends and acolytes. Buttafuoco represents the kind of sea change the Meloni government wants to extend to every cultural and social institution in the nation: figures will be chosen for their depth, competence and experience alone."

Buttafuoco, whose latest book is a paean to Italy's brash and venal former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi, takes up the biennale presidency in March. In the meantime, he has been coyly keeping people guessing as to his intentions. However, his elevation to the top job follows a populist playbook straight out of Poland and Hungary, where right-wing governments co-opted ideologically aligned polemicists to monitor and mould the dissemination of culture.

Ratti is also treading carefully for now, greeting the news of his apotheosis as architecture director with gnomic platitudes. "We architects like to think we are smart, but real intelligence is everywhere," he pronounced. "The disembodied ingenuity of evolution, the growing power of computers, and the collective wisdom of the crowd. To face a burning world, architecture must harness all the intelligence around us."

Those attempting to fathom the style and tone of a Ratti biennale might begin with his most recent op-ed for the New York Times, co-authored with Harvard economics professor Edward Glaeser. Headlined "Billionaire-Built Cities Would Be Better Than Nothing", it argues for the role of private investors and corporations in developing new urban settlements, focusing on a controversial attempt by a consortium of Silicon Valley's most powerful investors, including LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, to build a new city outside San Francisco for 400,000 people.

It's clear the biennale as a whole cannot help being impacted by the installation of a new president

Viewed as a supposedly safe pair of Italian hands, Ratti's appointment marks a screeching U-turn from Lokko, whose tenure was structured around narratives of decarbonisation and decolonisation. Ratti could not be more different. As well as his enthusiasm for billionaires as agents of change, he espouses a cerebral, tech-bro Ted-talk conception of architecture, where technology, however preposterous, is seen as a panacea for the world's problems.

In tandem with running his Turin-based practice, Ratti is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he directs the Senseable City Lab, concerned with how "sensing technologies" and flows of digital data, including controversial practices such as facial recognition, can help to address the quality of life in cities.

When covid first struck in early 2020, before the scale and spread of the virus overwhelmed healthcare provision, Ratti was quick to propose idealistic but often impractical design responses. These included re-purposing shipping containers as intensive care units and a portable device to disinfect clothing using ozone. "Never let a crisis go to waste," he said at the time.

On a lighter note, among his various start-up projects is a robotic bartending system, now widely employed on cruise ships, which at least might be of some use in the cocktail hour scrums of the biennale's press vernissage.

Since the architecture biennale was formally established in 1980, its more successful iterations have involved directors going beyond the insular confines of architects talking to architects. And Lokko, of Scots-Ghanian heritage, also showed that representation matters. While it's still early days, it's clear the biennale as a whole cannot help being impacted by the installation of a new president and the accompanying, increasingly strident, political mood music.

The only hopeful intimation is that given the volatility of Italian politics, with 69 changes of government in the postwar era, who knows where things will be in 2025. But the direction of travel is not encouraging.

Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the 20th Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review. She has attended every Venice Architecture Biennale since 1996.

The photo is by Andrea Avezzù courtesy of the Venice Architecture Biennale.

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The recently concluded COP28 summit in Dubai was a reminder of just how complex finding meaningful solutions to the climate crisis will be, writes Sumita Singha.

It seems that COPs have become the climatic equivalent of the Olympic Games, except they happen each year with no winners.

The much-delayed deal at COP28 called on all countries to "transition away" from using fossil fuels for the first time – but not to phase them out, as many countries wanted. Island nations hard-hit by the climate crisis are critical of the deal, though it was approved by nearly 200 nations. Campaign groups such as Greenpeace also say the agreement doesn't go far enough and that the transition won't happen in a "fair and fast manner".

The Two-Thirds World needs help before being lectured by rich nations

This was my first Conference of the Parties (COP). Certainly a party it was, with celebrities, world leaders and politicians, people wearing plastic floral wreaths and feathers, colourful umbrellas and national dresses, some serving tea and biscuits. The nearly 100,000 people gathered there seemed good-natured and affable despite the Middle Eastern heat, 30-40-minute walks to reach venues, long queues, restaurants running out of food and lack of facilities for the disabled.

As a meat-eating Buddhist, I encountered vegan peace protesters from Hong Kong with glossy leaflets about how bad meat is, and I reflected upon how complex and personal the solutions to the climate crisis are. The youth protesting about fossil fuels while wearing fast fashion, which is responsible for more carbon emissions than shipping and aviation combined. The delegate from the Solomon Islands, pregnant with her fifth child, would be uncomfortable talking about overpopulation. The delegate from Somalia who told me how she'd driven to watch three football matches in one day in Qatar. Who was I to pour water on her enjoyment?

The complexity is upon nations too. Can Iraq, for example, which has been bombed to smithereens, stop exporting the oil that is its main source of income? UAE and Qatar, both energy-intensive nations and major exporters of oil, are also major negotiators in the ongoing conflict in the Middle East (wars contribute 6 per cent of carbon emissions). Each country and each person needs a tailored approach.

The Two-Thirds World needs help before being lectured by rich nations about cutting down on their emissions. China is a major polluter, but much of its emissions come from goods produced for export. And while Western nations and industries plant trees in other parts of the world in the name of carbon offsetting, they continue to dump waste on South America, Asia and Africa where it is ultimately burned as poor countries struggle to deal with it. There were abundant slogans about "net zero", but nothing about "de-growth".

Dubai was an interesting choice for this conference. It is a city of immigrants, particularly from the Indian subcontinent, and now increasingly from Africa. The 2020 Expo site was manned 24 hours a day using 12-hour shifts, with airline style security.

Many people I met in the city were completely unaware of the huge conference about the environment being held in the Expo. I talked to a five-months pregnant woman who was working there to send money for her four-year-old left with her parents in Nigeria. I asked her how she was coping. She said she would work until her sixth month and then survive on the single income from her husband, who was also working in Dubai, since there was no maternity pay.

Where were the architects, designers and other creatives in the debate?

At my hotel, I met the Pakistani doorman who was a trained glazier brought in to work on the city's shiny edifices, but claimed he had been cheated out of his salary for six months and was now living on borrowed money and trying to pay off his debts.

Dubai, with its high-energy architecture, endless roads, incomplete metro lines and gaudy malls seemed to pose perfectly the question: "Is this what you want? Is this progress?" Why not have the next COP at Tuvalu before it disappears – or even Bangladesh during the monsoons, so that world leaders can experience how the Two-Thirds World lives?

If many poor nations appear despondent at the COP28 deal, it is perhaps because they remember that most of the agreements reached at the COP15 held in Paris – the landmark Paris Agreements – have not been followed through. Some of the island nations say that they were not in the room when the agreement was reached. The official Indigenous representatives were outnumbered by attendees linked to the fossil-fuel industry by seven to one. Given they stand to lose so much more, they could have been given more of a voice.

I wondered why exemplar nations like Bhutan, Panama and Suriname – all of which are carbon negative with over 60 per cent forested areas – weren't given centre-stage, instead of big companies and rich countries. They argue they should be paid for maintaining the world's lungs.

And importantly, where were the architects, designers and other creatives in the debate? I met many, but none of the architects that seemed to be making an impact were pursuing architecture or design – rather they were CEOs and presidents of NGOs. One was a former first lady and one was a minister for the environment.

As creatives dependent upon patronage, client budgets and tastes, as well as regulations, our ability to experiment is much hampered. At least the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has been granted "observer status" since COP26 in Glasgow. Engaging can help change the world in small ways.

Sumita Singha is an architect, educator and writer. She is director of Ecologic Architects and has served on several RIBA committees, as well as founding the institute's equality forum, Architects For Change. She is author of Architecture For Rapid Change and Scarce Resources, published by Routledge, and received an Order of the British Empire in 2021 for services to architecture. She was writing for Dezeen in a personal capacity.

The photo is by Sumita Singha.

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By choosing Peach Fuzz as its Colour of the Year Pantone has celebrated passivity – when what the world really needs in 2024 is bravery and honesty, writes Michelle Ogundehin.

Pantone's Colour of the Year for 2024, Pantone 13-1023 Peach Fuzz, is a sweet, pleasant and friendly colour. It's nice. Which is a thoroughly loathsome word, often lumped together with kind. Even though (if you're an etymological pedant) there is a difference between being nice and being kind.

Kindness is often expressed through actions – doing something that is helpful to others – while niceness tends to involve more superficial words or agreeable, appeasing gestures. A nice person is sorry to hear you are unwell, a kind person may bring you soup. However, let's note up front that neither will prevent you from catching the cold that's going around in the first place.

The current cultural climate feels more brink-of-societal-collapse than fuzzy agreeableness

How does this relate to the colour? Well, according to the press release, Peach Fuzz "captures the global zeitgeist, serving as an expression of a mood and an attitude on the part of the consumer".

Except the current cultural climate feels more brink-of-societal-collapse than fuzzy agreeableness. Chronic disease is on the rise globally, mental health disorders too, both increasingly linked to a worldwide escalation in stress, pollution and environmental toxins.

Two brutal wars are playing out to no predicted peaceful resolution; one, the largest attack on a European country since world war two, has been raging for almost two years. Biodiversity loss is at catastrophic levels, and let's not even start on the ravages of climate change.

Despite this, the dominant homily of the times is #BeKind! A divisive sentiment at best – lovely in principle, but in reality often used to shut down dissent and quash opinion, especially for women.

But let us return to Pantone's peachy press release. "Peach Fuzz brings belonging, inspires recalibration, and an opportunity for nurturing, conjuring up an air of calm, offering us a space to be, feel, heal and to flourish."

Excuse me for interrupting the Kumbaya moment, but we will have zero chance to heal or flourish, whether ourselves or the planet, if we don't get up and start campaigning for urgent change. Right now we have many reasons to be angry, strident and to loudly protest. When the status quo needs to be challenged, being "kind" feels tantamount to being a pushover.

I see the colour of toilet roll, no longer stocked by anyone, anywhere

"I must be cruel, only to be kind," said Hamlet. This is perhaps a more appropriate positioning for now. We're surely overdue some uncomfortable truths?

Nonetheless, the "heartfelt" Peach Fuzz, promises to communicate a message of "caring and sharing, community and collaboration".

Really? I see only compromise. I see a colour widely used in the 1950s to paint the walls of swanky fashion salons because its flattering glow wrapped the privileged clientele in a permanently good light. I see the colour of toilet roll, no longer stocked by anyone, anywhere because it is a deeply unpopular, sickly shade. And I see the colour of pancake, the thick, sticky make-up used to obliterate any perceived facial imperfection.

Peach, I would therefore argue, is the colour of unrealistic optimism, of romantic hope over honesty. Lacking the passionate punch of red, it's a wishy-washy watered-down hue, stuck somewhere between the brash confidence of orange and vacuousness. It's deliberately muted. A colour that's been cancelled.

Which brings me to another potentially fascinating aspect of niceness. Remember that cold? Being nice can make you more susceptible to succumbing to infection.

According to Dr Gabor Maté, the renowned if somewhat controversial expert on the effect of stress, addiction and trauma on health, "There are certain inescapable patterns in people that get sick with chronic illness. The patterns include the repression of healthy anger. These are very nice people."

Peach is the colour of unrealistic optimism, of romantic hope over honesty

In brief (very), he's correlating the condition of being pathologically nice with an inability to express oneself authentically, whether due to social conditioning or external expectations of how you should act. "Once these beliefs are ingrained in your personality, they invite illness because of the stress they generate," he concludes.

Simplistic perhaps, but you can't help but admit there could be truth in this.

As such, avoiding the perils of excessive niceness, or a constant expectation to #BeKind, requires proactive acknowledgment of our genuine needs and wants, as well as setting boundaries. It's also about being heard in the expression of those needs. This latter bit often gets forgotten today.

Instead, we're living in an era where genuflection to wokeism is the norm and "sensitivity" censoring exists in every realm to avoid offending anyone, anywhere, about anything. Weaponised grievances masquerade as social concern, with people personally invested in one point of view harassing and de-platforming others for daring to hold a differing opinion. This is no way to go on.

Of course, launching a spectacle like Colour of the Year is very knowing. It's inevitably about making as much marketing noise as possible. As a result, it should never be taken as a definitive statement of anything of much importance.

However, in laying claim to epitomise the current state of the world, Pantone might just have inadvertently nailed a disturbingly true depiction of the pernicious impotence at the very heart of the current cultural malaise. It's the right colour, but for all the wrong reasons.

What we needed for 2024 was an assertive, empowering and honest colour. Not nice. Not kind. Merely truthful. A colour that says enough is enough. And that's 100 per cent not Peach Fuzz.

Michelle Ogundehin is a thought leader on interiors, trends, style and wellbeing. Originally trained as an architect and the former editor-in-chief of ELLE Decoration UK, she is the head judge on the BBC's Interior Design Masters, and the author of Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness, a guide to living well. She is also a regular contributor to publications including Vogue Living, FT How to Spend It magazine and Dezeen.

The image is courtesy of Pantone.

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Pods are more popular than ever but offer far more than merely a place to take a call in a busy office, writes Freyja Sewell.

Like mushrooms after a damp night in autumn, it seems pods are popping up everywhere lately. From fuzzy booths for private phone calls to high-tech, egg-shaped meditation chambers and sound-insulated cylinders in co-working spaces, it seems to me that pods have quietly become a standard part of our open-plan interior landscape.

It might seem that this furniture category should be newly inserted between lamps and sofas, but, just like those mushrooms, they are actually the recent fruit of a much longer and larger underground network, an epoch spanning design history but little discussed. As both a fan and a designer, please allow me to reveal the potent power of the pod.

Pods are a tool of consciousness exploration

Our story starts, as many good human stories do, in the cave. In many ancient cultures, including that of China and Greece, caves served as shelters where religious devotees could separate themselves from society. A human amongst other humans is subject to social conformity, but by entering a pod-like cave the human is liberated from this pressure, entering into a state of unobserved freedom.

A deep, natural cave is pitch black and almost entirely sound-proof. Without the "objective noise of sensory correction or reality testing, consciousness focuses solely on the subjective self", to quote Yulia Ustinova's book, Caves and the Ancient Greek Mind: Descending Underground in the Search for Ultimate Truth. Pods are a tool of consciousness exploration.

This idea was much further developed by an important design figure in today's whirlwind history: John C Lilly, creator of the first isolation tank in 1954. Lilly's tank was a box-like construction of vinyl-lined plywood. It would undergo many transformations before arriving at the smooth organic forms you may be familiar with at your local commercial Floatworks.

Pods are devices to travel internally, but they are also a critical part of external exploration, from Alexander the Great's underwater escapades in the 16th century to Yuri Gagarin's in 1961, who became the first human to leave, and return to, our planet. The forms of early spaceships, and indeed the images of our curved blue-ball Earth, would inspire a heady age for pods – the space-age design launched in the 1960s.

There are far too many pods to introduce in detail here, so I'll just mention a couple of my favourites. How about the Archigram Cushicle, a wearable, spacesuit-inspired pod? And Haus Ruckers' classic Balloon for 2, which took the form of a delicate bubble unfurling from a pre-war Viennese apartment building. Without damaging or destroying the old, a bubble of privacy in a public sphere was created. And we must of course make room for the iconic Ball Chair by Eero Aarnio.

We arrive in the 1970s to another time crucial to the history of pods, the Metabolist movement. Kisho Kurokawa and his fellow architects, designers and thinkers sought to reinterpret the urban environment as a living whole, a complex network of responsive and interlinked parts. As the human body repairs and replaces individual cells to maintain the whole, so the city becomes a living and adaptable system of capsules comprised of still more capsules.

Privacy has become an even more elusive and rare condition

Kurokawa saw these capsules, his chosen word for pod, as spaces where the "characteristics and feelings of the individual human being" could be restored against the unification of modernisation and mass manufacture. In his own words: "The capsule is defined as a space which guarantees complete privacy for the individual. It assures the physical and spiritual independence of the individual."

I believe this to be a beautifully articulated understanding of what pods can achieve, and it also offers some explanation as to why we see pods proliferating at such a pace around us today. After all, privacy has become an even more elusive and rare condition, with pervasive CCTV, the rise of open-plan offices and the pressure to record and share almost every moment through the ubiquitous camera phone.

I certainly felt this pressure in university, and it spurred me to offer my own contribution to the history of pods, with the Hush chair in 2011. I craved something softer and more environmentally sensitive than the beautiful but plastic-heavy offerings of the 1960s and '70s. After much experimentation I settled on felt and a biophilic form that could be fully closed to provide the privacy and protection I craved and wanted to facilitate.

In 2015 humans officially became an urban species, with more people living in cities than outside. We can now choose from an almost dizzying array of commercially available pods to suit our needs. Many new pods, for example an offering by Headspace, combine our modern understanding of neuroscience and mediation with the physical properties of privacy in the public sphere. The Somadome Pod builds on the work of Lilly and Haus Rucker, with trance-inducing light and sound displays.

As a pod fan and builder I'm delighted. I have curled up in many for naps and solitude in our hectic shared spaces. I hope this (very) brief history will encourage you to keep your eyes peeled for one near you to snuggle up inside, so you may also experience the power of the pod.

Freyja Sewell is an interdisciplinary designer and artist whose work focuses on a biophilic vision of the future.

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French studio Lacaton & Vassal, which was today named the winner of the Soane Medal, demonstrates how architects can work with, not against, communities and existing buildings, writes Edwin Heathcote.

When architects Lacaton & Vassal were commissioned to improve the Place Léon Aucoc in Bordeaux in 1996 they didn't do much at all. In fact they left it pretty much as it was, with an instruction to do more regular maintenance and to replace some of the gravel.

It was, in its way, a pretty revolutionary move. This was the height of the icon, the age of starchitecture and architects were being encouraged to bring an injection of sculptural adrenaline to knackered cities. Instead, the Parisian pair studied the square carefully and found it worked pretty well, no need for change here. "It was not doing nothing," Ann Lacaton told me recently – "it was a commission. And to leave it was a decision."

 Never demolish might have sounded a little mad in 1996, but now it sounds visionary

Lacaton and Philippe Vassal, who have just been awarded the Soane Medal (which I was a jury member for), have made their name with their slogan "never demolish". It might have sounded a little mad in 1996, but now it sounds visionary. This was a practice that respected the already existing and sought not to replace but to repair.

They hit the headlines with their Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2021, but they had been making waves for two decades before that. First it was with their remarkable transformation of the Palais de Tokyo in 2002 (expanded in 2014), a stripping out of a classical/art deco exhibition hall to create a raw, haunting, cavernous interior which became Paris's riposte to London's Tate Modern.

The scarred concrete, the structure denuded of its classical aspirations and the vast spaces made for a perfect venue for art and action, creating a cool, ruthlessly stripped interior in a city of gilded rooms and fancy palaces.

Their next big impact though came with a very different kind of building, a social housing slab on the edges of Paris. At the Tour Bois-le-Prêtre in 2011 (working with architect Frédéric Druot) they re-clad an unpromising, albeit solid 16-storey 1970s slab in a diaphanous veil of cheap polycarbonate.

The striking thing here was that they left the residents in place during the works so that the community would not be disturbed and the inhabitants wouldn't become disengaged from their homes. The floor plates were extended with balconies and the building reclothed. Once tired and a little ragged, it became a beautiful thing, a translucent tower resembling a piece of avant garde modernism yet all for social housing tenants who had got used to not being consulted or cared about.

It was an extremely radical project and one which provokes the question of why it has not been replicated almost universally. It was done at least one more time in Bordeaux in 2017 to even more delightful effect, the architects wrapping a layer of winter gardens around the homes, an insulating layer but one which ingeniously gave the residents extra space without interfering with their floorpans.

Construction is fiercely carbon intensive so whatever can be saved should be

They added over 50 per cent extra floorspace to the flats as well as eight new dwellings, it resulted in construction costs of one third of a potential replacement and with half of that carbon footprint. All this for towers that were going to be demolished.

They had tested the language out at a house in Bordeaux in 1999 which saw a biscuit factory converted but also at another dwelling in Floirac a few years earlier in 1993. Here they created a basic house and fronting it up with a huge polycarbonate conservatory which imparted a kind of agricultural appearance, covering space as cheaply as possible.

They then went on to use similar ideas at their wonderful FRAC Nord-Pas de Calais art gallery where they created a kind of ghost twin for a derelict ship-building shed. Rather than renovating the existing shed they left it naked and a little decrepit, creating instead a mirror-image next door, again in cheap, translucent polycarbonate and left the old, 1949 structure as an epic shed for events and installations.

They can do new builds as well as anybody, just look at the architecture school in Nantes, a genuinely flexible, remarkably fluid building which has become a place of real communal activity. But it is their attitude to the existing that has made them harbingers of a new and not entirely uncontroversial moment for architecture.

If designers might be nervous about AI taking their jobs they might also (you would hope) be suffering from anxiety about the embodied carbon in the buildings they are destroying to get the opportunity of creating their new works.

Construction is fiercely carbon intensive so whatever can be saved should be. But what their work suggests, I think, is that architecture is almost invariably more interesting if designers need to work not only with existing structures and extant fabric but with existing communities, with people in place.

Much bullshit is spouted about "placemaking" but often the best places already exist

What might seem like a constraint is a reality check, a reminder that architecture is not a tabula rasa but that it intervenes in complex and delicate infrastructures of relationships and networks. As so many social housing projects in the UK have shown, once residents are "decanted" very few end up returning, whether by design or by fate.

Much bullshit is spouted about "placemaking" but often the best places already exist. The trick is not to screw them up. Lacaton and Vassal have illustrated how architects can work with and not against residents and communities, respecting not only the people and their memories but the collective memory of structures embedded into both the physical and the psychic landscape.

Architects are too often complicit in gentrification and social cleansing, whether unthinkingly or for reasons of pure commerce or ego. Lacaton & Vassal have shown another way. ‘"Demolition" Lacaton told me "is a form of violence". "Never demolish, always transform, with and for the inhabitants," she said.

The main image is of Transformation of 530 Dwellings by Frédéric Druot Architecture, Lacaton & Vassal Architectes and Christophe Hutin Architecture. The photo is by Philippe Ruault.

Edwin Heathcote is an architect and writer who has been architecture and design critic of The Financial Times since 1999. His numerous books on architecture include Monument Builders, Contemporary Church Architecture and the recently released On the Street: In-Between Architecture.

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Vast swathes of London's social housing continue to be demolished in the name of estate regeneration, but Anna Minton believes things could be about to change.

Estate regeneration schemes have seen more than 100 of London's council estates demolished and replaced with developments of predominantly luxury apartments, redefining the British capital and fuelling the housing crisis. Communities across London have been displaced and tens of thousands of new homes have been built, but the vast majority are financially far out of reach for people seeking to buy a home, while thousands lie empty and unsold.

But as the UK government responds to the climate emergency, the retrofit and reuse of buildings in place of demolition to achieve net-zero is becoming a priority. Combined with the highly contentious nature of estate regeneration, an unfavourable economic climate and the halting of landmark demolitions, the tide may finally be turning against knocking down social-housing estates.

Communities across London have been displaced and tens of thousands of new homes have been built

London mayor Sadiq Khan signalled a move away from demolition not backed by residents in 2018, declaring that estate regeneration schemes need to obtain support through mandatory ballots. Since then, high profile plans to demolish architecturally acclaimed estates Cressingham Gardens and Central Hill have been "paused" by Lambeth Council after an independent review by the late crossbench peer Bob Kerslake recommended a "fundamental reset" to the council's handling of the redevelopments.

Sentiment is also moving sharply against what is known as the "cross-subsidy" approach to regeneration that has dominated in the past two decades, in which council estates are demolished to make way for expensive for-sale properties that in turn fund building a proportion of more affordable homes. The model was declared "bust" by housing association leaders as far back as 2019, before the economic downturn left thousands of apartments unsold across developments in London.

While plans for demolition come under scrutiny, more emphasis is being placed on infill development, such as Camden's rejuvenation of the post-war Kiln Place social housing estate. Working with the London Borough of Camden, Peter Barber Architects upgraded the whole estate and increased its density without demolishing any existing homes.

Brutalist estates that escaped the wrecking ball through listing, such as Erno Goldfinger's exemplar of social housing Trellick Tower, are enduringly popular and it is not difficult to see how many other estates could be revitalised through refurbishment and infill. Despite the stigmatised image of many estates, retention is often popular with local communities.

Aysen Dennis has been at the vanguard of the fight to save south London's condemned Aylesbury Estate for the last 20 years. The Aylesbury first hit the headlines in 1997, when Tony Blair chose the estate to deliver his first speech as prime minister, placing housing at the centre of his policy programme.

Since then, its declining fortunes have mirrored the decimation of social housing. In 2005, despite widespread opposition from residents, Southwark Council announced it would demolish the estate and in 2010, the process of moving residents out began.

Nothing had prepared me for the event, which saw hundreds of people fill the corridor

Earlier this year, Dennis opened up her home and held an exhibition in her two-bedroom flat, documenting and celebrating the struggles of residents to save the estate over the last decade. With its fabulous light-filled views over London, her home filled with artwork, activity and colour was in sharp contrast to what she described as the "managed decline" of the estate around her.

I was invited to speak about the housing crisis at the exhibition, which caught the attention of national newspapers from The Times to the Daily Express that Dennis later told me misrepresented her by claiming she was surrounded by squatters and anti-social behaviour. I arrived at her flat on the eighth floor where she was one of the few remaining residents still living there, expecting to speak to a small group of housing activists.

As her cosy living room filled with a stream of people sitting on the floor, it became clear that we would need to move outside. Nothing had prepared me for the event, which saw hundreds of people fill the corridor as far as the eye could see, reflecting the strength of feeling and support for the ongoing campaign.

Feeling the winds of change, campaigners on the Aylesbury now hope that a last-ditch legal appeal could succeed where all else has failed, raising the possibility that demolition may be paused here as well.

Already a previous public inquiry, despite ultimately ruling in favour of demolition in 2017, set a precedent for significantly higher levels of compensation to flat-owners than the appalling low sums offered to Aylesbury leaseholders. This changed the financial dynamics of estate regeneration, making it harder for social-housing landlords councils to stack up the numbers.

This latest legal challenge affects the second phase of the development – the first phase has already been demolished and rebuilt. At a hearing this week on 28 November, the High Court will consider a judicial review brought forward on Dennis's behalf by Public Interest Law Centre.

Dennis's fight to save the estate may, against the odds, still be in with a chance

The claim argues that the planning permission recently granted for part of this phase, which involves the demolition of five buildings including Dennis's home, differs substantially from the original planning permission as the proposal includes plans to build a much taller 26-storey tower for private sale on the site.

The highly technical legal case concerns a "Section 96A non-material amendment" to the original outline planning permission covering the estate, which adds the word "severable" to the permission, effectively making it much easier for the developer to change the scheme. The case, which is being closely watched by lawyers, could be critical because it comes soon after a Supreme Court judgement found that land is not severable unless the permission clearly says so.

The Aylesbury has long been a bellwether for the future of social housing, and it could be that Dennis's fight to save the estate may, against the odds, still be in with a chance.

Anna Minton is the author Big Capital: Who is London for?, published by Penguin. She is a reader in architecture at the University of East London.

The photo is by PA Images/Alamy.

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Continuing our Designing for Disaster series, Yasmeen Lari warns that architects in the Global North cannot ignore the threat from environmental hazards exacerbated by climate change.

As built environment professionals and as architects, are we aware that we are aggravating climate change because of the way we design and build? All around the world, most architecture practices continue to indulge in extravagant imagery that can only be actualised using carbon-emitting industrialised materials.

Unless architects begin thinking of democratising and decarbonising architecture, the ultimate outcome will remain the edification of our own egos in the service of privileged entities – even when many of us might be conscious of the damage inflicted on the planet by our uncurbed creativity.

I am pleading for sanity to prevail

Is it not time for architects, considered among the most environmentally sensitive professionals, to become eco-ethics activists? Instead of attempting to fulfil the desires of the wealthy, should we not sensitise our clients to the needs of the earth's ecosystem that today needs critical care for its survival?

I had the advantage of becoming aware of the severity of the situation several years ago, since my country, Pakistan, is among the five most vulnerable countries. It has been suffering from frequent disasters over the past few decades. Last year alone we suffered from the most devastating floods which displaced 33 million people – more than the entire population of Australia and half the population of the UK.

But then is it fair that the Global North should continue to indulge in eco-bigotry and high-carbon undertakings while countries such as Pakistan, responsible for only 1 per cent of global greenhouse-gas emissions continue to endure the brunt of climate change?

I am not attempting to make a case for reparations for the losses suffered by frontline climate-change states. Nor do I wish to seek payments from high emitters responsible for untenable emissions levels. In my view, such demands carry tacit approval of unethical proposals propounded by eco-indulgent countries for pacifying resource-deficient countries in the Global South.

Rather, I am pleading for sanity to prevail in order that we relinquish the desire to exploit the planet for the benefit of a handful of individuals and nations driven by consumption-loving lifestyles. It is time for all of us to become aware of the gravity of the situation.

Today, it is Pakistan where one-third of the country is going through the cycle of misery, hunger and disease, but tomorrow it could well be many other countries, who have so far escaped the grievous impact. When I visit countries such as the UK and the USA, I am struck by how many cities are now suffering from urban heat islands and urban flooding.

It is professionals such as ourselves who carry the responsibility

It is time to work on fashioning a new world order where the convenience for a few should no longer hold sway over the benefit for the majority. Especially under the present circumstances, where urban centres that emit 65-70 per cent of greenhouse gases must be rescued from becoming global-warming battlegrounds.

There are alternatives available to us. As we know, many experts around the world are supporting the creation of eco-cities, eco-urbanism, sponge cities, de-growth, transition design and principles of circular economy, including reuse of all buildings, even contemporary buildings. It is well known that 40 per cent of emissions are due to the use of industrial materials and current construction methodologies.

It is professionals such as ourselves who carry the responsibility to ensure the lowering of the carbon footprint in all that we design. It is clear that curtailing the use of cement and steel and other industrialised products will help us reach that elusive figure of 1.5 degree Celsius rise per year echoed by various Conferences of the Parties assemblies since the historic Paris Agreement in 2015.

We can make our urban centres liveable again. In Karachi, I have embarked on a city-wide programme called Climate-Smart Eco-Streets. Since it is difficult to take up entire city quarters, we are in the process of transforming one street at a time.

We use low-carbon, permeable terracotta pavements that help mitigate flooding and cool the environment in place of high-carbon, impervious concrete pavers. We restrict the demolition of existing buildings and prevent motorised vehicles from entering. We plant dense, Miyawaki-style dense urban forests that absorb CO2, provide shade and boost biodiversity, supported by wells to conserve storm water, keeping the soil fertile while also preventing flooding.

After my Foundation created the first eco-street, Denso Hall Rahguzar walking street in the historic core of Karachi in 2021, the Karachi administration has realised how simple, localised solutions can prevent urban flooding and forestall the formation of urban heat islands. At the same time, a climate-resilient, healthy environment is benefitting all users, encouraging tourism, commerce and cultural activities.

I am optimistic that we will be able to recreate humanistic eco-environments

By adopting the above simple principles and low-tech, low-impact options, many urban centres of the world would be able to mitigate the impact of climate change, and would become liveable again.

Remember: cities are for people and not for cars, nor extensive highways or imposing structures that undermine human scale and inhibit human interaction. By making streets into climate-smart eco-streets, I am optimistic that we will be able to recreate humanistic eco-environments harking back to the community living of the medieval towns of Pakistan and Europe.

Yasmeen Lari is the founder of the Heritage Foundation of Pakistan. She was Pakistan's first female architect and the recipient of the 2023 RIBA Royal Gold Medal.

The photography is by UNICEF/Bashir.

Designing for Disaster

This article is part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series, which explores the ways that design can help prevent, mitigate and recover from natural hazards as climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly common.

The post "It is time for all of us to become aware of the gravity of the situation" appeared first on Dezeen.

Continuing our Designing for Disaster series, disasters expert Ilan Kelman shares advice for designers and architects on averting catastrophe.

A generation ago, in 1999, a team led by disasterologist Dennis Mileti published a comprehensive review of disasters in the US titled "Disasters by Design". The key lesson for design professionals, based on decades of previous disaster science, was that disasters can be stopped through planning, engineering and architecture connected to other skills and professions. The choice has to be made to do so.

Choices are made, through policies, laws, client expectations, tender details and budgeting, among other constraints. How and where to site buildings, which materials to use and which design standards to follow.

Admit the limits and plan for what happens when (not if) those limits are surpassed

These choices determine how well infrastructure performs under pressure. Roofs could be designed and built to withstand the strongest winds possible, such as a powerful tornado passing over. It would be expensive and might increase problems in earthquakes, during which heavy roofs can increase collapse potential. Not to mention considering strikes from tornado-borne debris.

Alternatively, laws could require that wind, earthquakes, landslides, avalanches, tsunamis, volcanic ash and all other environmental hazards plus debris are accounted for. Many require similar design features, rather than trade-offs. The correct strength and slope of roofs can address wind, snow, and volcanic ash. Wall, door and window design for lateral forces helps with wind, floodwater and debris.

Irrespective, few structures could withstand everything from nature, and those might not be comfortable to use. Instead, understandable choices are made to balance different needs.

Admit the limits and plan for what happens when (not if) those limits are surpassed. As long as plenty of warning is available alongside safe and effective evacuation routes and sheltering for everyone, it is often best to get out of the way of a fire or a flood followed by rebuilding afterwards. Then, authorities and people affected must be committed to and certain of warning, evacuation, sheltering and reconstruction support for everyone.

The disaster is not a fire, a flood or wind, since sometimes people suffer during these hazards and sometimes they do not. The disaster is when infrastructure collapses lead to suffering, when people die during evacuation or sheltering, or when support for sheltering and reconstruction is absent, so again people suffer. The disaster is people suffering, rather than how buildings are affected by nature.

Disasters are caused by longer-term societal decisions taken with and without design professionals to avoid preparing for, mitigating damage from, reducing risk of and planning for environmental phenomena. The disaster is from society, not nature.

The disaster is people suffering, rather than how buildings are affected by nature

To convey this message and to confer responsibility for disasters on those with the power and resources to stop them, it is best to avoid the phrase "natural disaster". Disasters are not natural.

So what to do about the changing environment due to human-caused climate change? For tornadoes, the verdict remains undecided on how they are affected. Meanwhile, human-caused climate change appears to be leading to fewer hurricanes, but those which form are much more intense, meaning stronger winds and much more rainfall.

Designing for fewer hurricanes under human-caused climate change does not make sense, since a hurricane can and still will hit in hurricane alley during hurricane season. Considering more intense hurricanes is important for design, although it would have been necessary even without human-caused climate change, since floodplains and wind are affected by local decisions such as river engineering and high-rise development.

In fact, a strong hurricane could hit any year in any hurricane-prone location. The climate has long been changing, even without human influence, including several decades-long cycles leading hurricane numbers to wax and wane. Now, we are changing the climate quickly and substantially, far beyond the experience of modern humanity, with the effects all around us and visible now.

One enormous, frightening change that is impacting infrastructure and killing people every summer is heatwaves which are longer and more intense than we have experienced previously.

The signal from human-caused climate change is clear in heat-humidity values exceeding the human ability to survive outdoors, from India and Pakistan to London and Paris to British Columbia and Washington state. We can attribute many heatwave deaths to human-caused climate change, especially when it does not cool down sufficiently over successive nights and then our bodies do not recover from the day's heat.

We are caught in wider societal systems and expectations forcing choices that can lead to disasters

Twenty-four-seven indoor cooling is one approach. It is expensive, it burdens the power grid leading to power outages, and not everyone can stay indoors during a heatwave. Jobs are particularly affected in agriculture, construction, and delivery. Indoor garment workers in South Asia are also feeling the impacts, since their workplaces are typically crowded with poor ventilation. Implementing designs to help all these sectors under expected heat-humidity combinations is challenging.

Instead, stopping human-caused climate change would be the most successful choice for avoiding heatwave disasters. Laws and policies could require infrastructure to incorporate energy use reduction while switching to local and renewable energy supplies.

Wider planning aspects would support walking, cycling, and public transportation, factoring in safety, reliability, and all weather. These points then circle back to avoiding disasters in any weather – including the terrifying heatwaves happening now and certain to get worse due to human-caused climate change.

Design professionals can make choices to prove that disasters are not natural. More often, we are caught in wider societal systems and expectations forcing choices that can lead to disasters.

It is particularly challenging to address all concerns together. Imagine designing and building a school which is self-sufficient in energy and water while being outside an expanding floodplain – perfect for climate change, yet it then collapses in the next earthquake. Or building an entirely disaster-resistant school, accounting for all climate-change impacts, in a country where girls are not permitted to attend.

"Disasters by Design" refers not only to infrastructure damage during weather and other environmental phenomena. It also refers to long-term societal decisions forcing people into circumstances that cause problems for their everyday living.

Ilan Kelman is a professor of disasters and health at University College London's Institute for Risk and Disaster Reduction and is the author of multiple books on the subject of disasters, including Disaster by Choice.

The image is courtesy of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration via Unsplash.

Designing for Disaster

This article is part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series, which explores the ways that design can help prevent, mitigate and recover from natural hazards as climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly common.

The post "Design professionals can make choices to prove that disasters are not natural" appeared first on Dezeen.

The world urgently needs architects and designers to start prioritising humanitarian projects, writes Cameron Sinclair as part of our Designing for Disaster series.

What is humanity? From the Latin word "humanitas" we find the definition "human nature" and, within that, our unique and innate ability to love, have compassion and be creative.

If you look at the state of the planet, it is easy to feel like we've lost "our humanity" and our ability to love the place we collectively inhabit. From man-made conflicts to our inability to rebuild after natural disasters, it appears we spend more time justifying destruction than investing in tangible solutions.

Our future depends on how compassionate we are to our environment and how creative we are at successfully adapting to the changes that are happening all around us. The world desperately needs thoughtful and impassioned builders who believe in construction, not destruction. We need to train and empower a cadre of humanitarian designers and architects.

We will see more frequent and ever-stronger natural disasters. These cataclysmic events take only a few moments to tear apart a community, but generations to recover from. How we respond to disasters tells us a lot about our future.

The true disaster is often not the consequence of the natural destruction, but the man-made mistakes that can happen in the process of trying to rebuild communities. With climate collapse inevitable, we have allowed a bitterly divided public discourse and politics to dictate our future as a sustainable species on the planet. Let's be perfectly clear: the planet will not end, we will.

We are ill-equipped to deal with the coming design challenges

Our world is changing due to the impact of our species upon the fragile ecosystems of our once-thriving planet. Instead of confronting this new world, we are distracted by rapidly accelerating technology and are addicted to digital and alternative realities. The more we disconnect from our humanity, the more we ignore the real-world changes facing our planet. We are in a moment of absolute urgency and we must work together to design a way forward.

Now more than ever, our associations, representatives and leaders must work together to invest in our collective future. If they don't, it is imperative we create an alternative. One that goes beyond manifestos and ideation, but tangible solutions and new systems to implement projects. One that is willing to take on the politics of stagnation and hold our leaders accountable – not with protests but with solutions.

To do this we not only need to train and empower a cross-disciplinary army of building professionals, we need to call on academia to refocus curriculums for the future we face. We need to move from human-centered design to humanity-centered design. Three per cent of the world uses the services of an architect and there are many incredible schools of design and architecture that will train you for those clients.

For the other 97 per cent of the world, we are ill-equipped to deal with the coming design challenges. A few courses in passive-house design and net-zero building is not enough. For students that might be reading this, you do not work for your professors – they work for you. It is their role to prepare you for the future you will face.

Revolution in schools of architecture has happened before. In the 1960s, students from schools of architecture shut down campuses in the name of civil rights and social justice. The most well-known was in 1968 and the role of the Columbia University school of architecture in response to the Morningside Park gymnasium debacle. Some of those same radical activists who protested to force change to the curriculum are now the reluctant tenured professors and deans today.

Reflecting back, we have failed on the mandate to "design like you give a damn". On a personal level, I am more at fault than many of my colleagues because in October 2013, I stepped away from the industry. Reasons aside, what followed was a self-imposed 10-year exile after a dark period of serious and deep depression. Having lost my faith in humanity, I had lost faith in my own humanitas.

It took years to rediscover the desire to embrace design as a vehicle for change.

During conflict or after any disaster, I often receive emails or texts insinuating that I am the reason we don't have a system in place to respond. There are a litany of things I failed at with Architecture for Humanity, the humanitarian design non-profit that ran from 1999 to 2015, but the system we built was always an outlier; it was never meant to represent or supplement the responsibilities of the design or architecture industry. It was meant to exemplify the value of embedding ethics in our practice and that, when it comes to humanity, our industry has the love, compassion and creativity to respond.

It is my hope that the world's designers can come together collectively to amplify the best of humanity

Being in the wilderness taught me that the problem with humanitarian design wasn't the need, it was the lack of opportunity and support for thousands of design professionals who are not willing to watch the world burn or obsessed with designing habitats for inter-planetary colonizers.

The world is now more unstable and disjointed than it has ever been. There are a number of groups and organizations that are doing incredible projects around the world but it's clearly not enough. Currently, humanitarian design is like the Dutch boy holding back the dike, except the villagers are not coming to help and the dike is about to break.

This summer, we quietly launched Worldchanging Institute, a research and development institution focused on design solutions to humanitarian crises. The organization is empowering designers and architects to circumvent the partisan quagmire that emboldens the status quo. It is leading a series of site-specific projects in addition to expanding Design Like You Give A Damn to become the world's largest database of humanitarian design projects.

Additionally, we are focusing our attention on areas of the world that are at the frontline of these crises. The atolls and islands of the Pacific Ocean have only a few decades to figure out their future, and for the past year we have been working alongside a partnership of local organizations to support communities with a series of participatory design initiatives.

In 2024, Worldchanging Institute will take some of the lessons learned to host a series of programs to engage architects, designers, engineers and an array of creative individuals to tackle imminent challenges within these austere environments.

It is a very small effort within a monumental task, but we must start now. Whether it is through the Worldchanging Institute or another group, it is my hope that the world's designers can come together collectively to amplify the best of humanity in a time when we are needed more than ever. In 1999, as a naive young designer, I begged for an evolution of the profession. With the world at the precipice, there is no time to beg; we need a revolution. For the future of our species, our choice is clear: design or die.

Cameron Sinclair is founder of Worldchanging Institute, an Arizona-based research organisation focused on architectural and design solutions to humanitarian crises. He also advises family foundations and NGOs on responding to disasters.

The photo is by Saikiran Kesari via Unsplash.

Designing for Disaster

This article is part of Dezeen's Designing for Disaster series, which explores the ways that design can help prevent, mitigate and recover from natural hazards as climate change makes extreme weather events increasingly common.

The post "How we respond to disasters tells us a lot about our future" appeared first on Dezeen.

Dutch architecture may be at the forefront of sustainable building practices, but Aaron Betsky feels it has rather lost its sparkle in recent years.

"It is always a wave, and we are at the bottom of the swell," sighs one critic when I ask about the current state of Dutch architecture. "At least, I hope we are."

Architecture in the Netherlands has become notably boring in recent years. Without getting overly nostalgic, it is almost impossible not to notice that the country, which for a good two decades on either side of the millennium produced some of the most striking, innovative and experimental architecture in the world, is now building a lot of boxes.

Clad in brick or concrete, these office buildings, housing blocks and cultural institutions have little to no decoration or distinction. Their main flourish seems to be thin, vertically elongated arches that dance across some of the facades.

Several decades of right-wing-dominated politics and cost-cutting have eroded generous subsidies

A case in point is the evolution of one of OMA's first designs, the building that housed the Netherlands Dance Theater in The Hague. After it was deemed out of date 10 years ago, the firm Neutelings Riedijk won the competition for a new structure with a highly decorated and formally elaborate structure. A right-wing city government nixed the plan and now a box festooned with fluted columns, designed by NOAHH, with the concocted-by-consultants name Amare, has taken its place (pictured).

Similarly, the experiments and social housing in newly built settlements such as Ypenburg and Leidsche Rijn, built as part of the Vinex program to build a million homes, which gave hope to some of us that sprawl could be done right, have now been replaced by uniform blocks with neo-traditional facades.

"I really can't tell you of any really good new firms," wrote another leader in the field. Nobody I contacted wanted to speak about this situation on the record. Perhaps they do not want to add to negativity about the current state of architecture, or they do not want to offend local talent.

One critic, the editor-in-chief of De Architect, the largest architecture magazine in the country, Merel Pit, did give me a list of young firms she felt were doing interesting work. Most of them also design rectangular containers for various programs, although she was able to dig up a few that at least use more glass.

"For young architects it is difficult to receive commission," Pit added. A well-known architect, Sjoerd Soeters, closed his office this summer with the claim that it was too difficult to work with either the government or private clients these days.

Several decades of right-wing-dominated politics and cost-cutting have eroded the generous subsidies the Dutch used to give to young firms to help them get started, travel or exhibit and publish their work.

There is little of the openness to experimentation that the Dutch government at various levels used to display

Moreover, there is little of the openness to experimentation that the Dutch government at various levels used to display when it commissioned architects such as Ben van Berkel and Caroline Bos to design the Erasmus Bridge, OMA the offices of the Rotterdam city government or Benthem Crouwel the new Municipal Museum (Stedelijk Museum) in Amsterdam. And yes, the regulations, both financial and in terms of codes, have become more restraining.

That is not to say that the Netherlands has not seen remarkable buildings appear on its landscape in the last few years. OMA's loose stack of angular glass planes for the nHow Hotel and MVRDV's mixed-use eroded mountain, Valley Towers, both opened in 2022 on either side of the highway ringing Amsterdam's southern edge.

The latter firm's Depot for the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, a reflective glass "flower pot" containing six floors of open storage shot through with an atrium that provides dramatic views of the art stored there, which opened in 2023, is surely one of the most astonishing structures to be completed anywhere in the world since the pandemic.

However strong they are, these are designs that not only come out of firms that are by now decades old, they are also based on thinking and strategies at least as ancient. These ideas and forms might still work, but they are not helping us to understand and respond to the issues that architects in the Netherlands and elsewhere should be puzzling out by design.

There is one area in which the Dutch continue to be working out effective and innovative responses to social issues, and that is through reuse, imaginative forms of adaptive reuse, and upcycling.

The most important new-ish firm (founded in 2015) to my mind is Civic Architects. In collaboration with an array of established firms such as Mecanoo, Civic designed the most beautiful "new" building to open in the Netherlands in the last few years – the renovation of a former tram repair shop into LocHal, a library and community center in Tilburg, which opened in 2019.

This is not to say that the work being done by a host of younger firms is not of merit

Firms such as Jan Jongert's Superuse Studios, building on the tradition pioneered by the Droog Design movement starting in 1993, have pioneered dumpster diving as an architectural practice. It also happens to make beautiful spaces, like those in its own offices at BlueCity, a renovated spa along a dike bordering the Rhine river. The 20 year-old firm ZUS, meanwhile, is continuing the idea that architecture should be a form of intervention and social action that rarely if ever involves the use of natural resources to make buildings.

There are some firms that are continuing the high-visual-impact forms pioneered by the likes of OMA and Neutelings Riedijk at the turn of the millennium in a more polite mode. Notable among these is Barcode Architects, whose Sluishuis, a collaboration with OMA graduate Bjarke Ingles' Danish company BIG, features a triangular gate 10 storeys tall, cantilevered over the water in Amsterdam and carved out of an apartment block.

That the most expressive forms are either being produced by large, international firms such as OMA, MVRDV and Benthem Crouwel, which at this point just happen to be based in the Netherlands (even if those roots are central to their achievements) or in collaboration with firms from other countries, is quite telling. Twenty years ago, when the Dutch state privatized the postal service and other organizations that had commissioned some of the best graphic design in the world, the new identities for these organizations were almost all created by foreign companies.

The same tendency now seems to have crept into architecture: if they happen to have the chance to take risks or make a statement, developers seem to be looking beyond the borders, where larger firms such as BIG have shown they can build weirdness at scale.

This is not to say that the work being done by a host of younger firms, ranging from the carefully crafted facades and renovations by Marjolein van Eig to the restrained public buildings and housing by Happel Cornelisse Verhoeven to the generously proportioned minimalism of Maarten van Kesteren, is not of merit. Such architecture works with and responds to Dutch traditions, and seeks to ground itself in a sense of restraint perhaps exemplified by the old Dutch saying: "act normal, and you will be strange enough".

Like in almost every country in the world, most of what is getting built in the Netherlands is horrible. As elsewhere, there are always exceptions to be found and there are both good established firms and ambitious and talented youngsters who get a chance to make something. The problem – or, if you believe in restraint, the beauty – of that work is that almost all of it is utterly boring.

Aaron Betsky is a professor at Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. He has written more than a dozen books on architecture, design and art.

The photo is by Ossip van Duivenbode.

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Yet another low-key shortlist for the Stirling Prize this year reflects UK architecture's continued fading from the public eye, writes Catherine Slessor.

In line with the bookies' predictions, this year's Stirling Prize went to Mae's John Morden Centre daycare facility for Morden College, a charity that provides residential care for the elderly. Emblematic of what might be described as the "good ordinary", John Morden is thoughtful and unassuming, designed for a user constituency of active, older people, who all too often can be patronised, neglected and isolated. It's second-time lucky for Mae, which was also on the Stirling shortlist last year with Sand End Arts and Community Centre, another apt and robust manifestation of the "good ordinary".

If I were a betting woman, my money this year would have been on Apparata's House for Artists in Barking, a scheme both radical and delightful in the way it frames an armature for domestic life and creative practice. But in its thoughtful and unassuming way, Mae's project evidently seduced the Stirling jury, chaired by OMA's Ellen van Loon.

In some respects, this palpable shift to consistent earnestness is welcome

As is customary, there has been much picking over the entrails of the shortlist to see what it tells us about the state of British architecture. Along with Mae's daycare centre were three residential projects (including Apparata's), as well as a tactful restoration of the Courtauld Gallery at Somerset House and an arts faculty for Warwick University. Essentially, then, another low-key lineup – no billion-pound Bloombergs or statement distilleries.

For better or worse, this now seems to be the default setting of Stirling shortlists, arrived at through a long, rubber-stamped odyssey of scrupulous evaluation at RIBA regional and national awards level. From hundreds of hopefuls, six contenders finally emerge, supposedly crystallising the essence of "good architecture". And then, of course, comes the challenge of choosing a winner from often very disparate projects; rather like judging a literary prize in which a slim volume of poetry vies with a cookery book. But this year, the shortlist seemed less disparate, all cut from the same thoughtful and unassuming cloth. Really, any one of them could have won it.

In some respects, this palpable shift to consistent earnestness is welcome. Architecture isn't a disposable art form. It controls and shapes daily lives while manifesting complex social, political and cultural ambitions. Big-ticket projects might still get all the attention, but are not most people's quotidian experience of architecture. In the face of the current exigencies faced by the profession and the society it serves, there is clearly a need to recognise and rediscover a better kind of ordinary.

Yet I couldn't help but wonder: what do such dutifully dull shortlists say about the wider state of the Stirling? What purports to be the profession's leading architectural awards programme has become curiously introverted; becalmed, even. Those heady days when MAXXI would duke it out with the Neues Museum, Barajas battle with the Phaeno Science Centre, under a glitter ball at the Camden Roundhouse, while Kevin McCloud strode imperiously among packed dining tables pursued by cameramen and Klieg lights, reminding everyone that they were on LIVE TELEVISION are now a very distant memory.

Back then, whatever you may have thought of Kevin and the glitter ball, the Stirling was a conspicuous event. From fitful beginnings in 1996 (somewhat unbelievably, Stephen Hodder was its first recipient), it gathered momentum to become an annual cultural waypoint, like the Booker or the Turner, prestigious established prizes on which it was ambitiously templated.

Fluffed and amplified by media coverage, it wormed its way into the national conversation as architects, clients, critics and TV presenters attempted to explain to the public why this particular shortlist of buildings had been chosen; why they crystallised the essence of "good architecture". However artfully confected, the Stirling embodied a genuine sense of excitement about buildings, in tandem with the travelling circus of its awards evening, which covered the ground from the Roundhouse to Rotherham.

The profession's leading architectural awards programme has become curiously introverted

Now, it feels like architects are, once again, talking among themselves, despite the exhibition of the shortlisted schemes at the RIBA, despite the associated talks programme and despite the gala bacchanale in Manchester that would have set you back £349 (plus VAT) for a ticket.

Doubtless there are structural and logistical reasons for all this. The strategic hiving off of international projects into a separate RIBA award has effectively removed glamorous foreign outliers from contention. Never again will a MAXXI or a Barajas win the Stirling. The non-renewal (or simple unavailability) of once-lucrative sponsorship deals has meant horns being drawn in and a general aura of cheeseparing, to the extent that there is no longer a cash prize for the winner (it was originally £20,000). In recent years, the awards ceremony was obliged to return to RIBA headquarters at Portland Place, conducted in the bunker of the Jarvis Hall, like a glorified school speech day.

Dedicated television coverage of the Stirling, which used to feature each of the shortlisted schemes in some detail, has now been supplanted by the RIBA's House of the Year, reducing architecture's myriad typological gene pool to a handful of vacuous vignettes dedicated to house porn. Perhaps it was concluded that television viewers aren't necessarily interested in different sorts of buildings, but the emphasis on dream homes gives them no choice and merely serves to reinforce a wretchedly idealised Daily Mail vision of the built environment.

Awards are a fact of life for most practices, the imprimatur of an RIBA gong seen as crucial in attracting clients and burnishing reputations. In turn, the RIBA rakes in entry fees. But within this cycle of co-dependency, there is a sense of complacency. It should not be beyond the RIBA to make a more effective job of promoting and disseminating the Stirling, its most publicly accessible award for architecture, and get ordinary people talking about good buildings. If the premise of the Stirling has moved on from the starchitect years in favour of more modest, "relatable" projects, then shouldn't they too have the opportunity to be discussed and valorised in a wider context? Shouldn't the "good ordinary" also go to the ball?

Catherine Slessor is an architecture editor, writer and critic. She is the president of architectural charity the 20th Century Society and former editor of UK magazine The Architectural Review.

The photo is by Jim Stephenson.

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Tech companies must move away from hype-chasing annual product releases in order to drive meaningful design innovation, writes Sarah Housley.

The economic shifts of the past 12 months have changed the context for innovation and could help both the tech and design industries move towards a less hype-fuelled, more considered process for product development.

It has been said that we are at "the end of free money". Where venture-capital investment used to flow to tech start-ups and scale-ups, spurring innovative products to market and creating many of the platforms that now enable digital culture, this year has seen interest rate rises and bank collapses that have changed the landscape considerably. While this period of "sobering" reshapes the tech industry, it also provides the wider creative sectors with the chance to change how we approach innovation – for the better.

There is increased pressure for breakthroughs to happen more quickly, and for the next big thing to appear

Unfortunately, so far that has not been the reality. According to industry tracker Layoffs.fyi, tech companies have laid off 242,481 employees so far this year. Companies have been busy streamlining: cutting down on employee perks, cutting risky or underperforming products and limiting funding into unproven research areas. There is increased pressure for breakthroughs to happen more quickly, and for the next big thing to appear.

Against this backdrop, the tech hype-cycle is spinning ever faster, and the big ideas offered by the tech industry have ever-shorter lives as a result.

The recent history of technology is littered with visions that are now perceived as having failed because they were hyped beyond all reason and then didn't immediately live up to the expectations created. The biggest example is the metaverse, an idea that was blossoming across tech by 2020 but crystallised into a mainstream bet when Meta's name-change was announced in 2021.

In 2022, McKinsey valued the metaverse as having the potential to generate $5 trillion by the end of the decade. Global interest in the concept soared and companies across sectors announced chief metaverse officers and full metaverse teams, despite few convincing use-cases having been developed. By May 2023, following a lack of consumer adoption, business magazine Insider had declared that "the Capital-M Metaverse is dead… the latest fad to join the tech graveyard".

With the metaverse and related Web3 ideas such as NFTs now largely in the rear-view mirror – for the moment – the same overinflated hype-cycle is being applied to AI, which is forecast by PwC to be worth up to $15.7 trillion to the global economy by 2030. What these bubbles have in common is that the technology, what it offers, and how it could be applied to products, is kept purposefully vague and broad so as to attract as much excitement and investment as possible.

Even as creatives strive to understand the capabilities of AI and how they might effectively and equitably work with the technology, the bubble is starting to wobble. Semafor's technology editor Reed Albergotti wrote in August: "I was a little surprised last night when a venture capitalist told a room full of tech journalists that AI was already in a 'trough of disillusionment' and that it was hard to find promising start-ups in the space."

Science and tech are reliant on the moonshot ambitions of billionaires and charitable foundations

All this comes at a time when calls are growing for governments to re-commence significant national support of scientific, technological and creative innovations. In the absence of the kind of broad and deep governmental support that led to many of the breakthroughs of the 20th century, science and tech are reliant on the moonshot ambitions of billionaires and charitable foundations, and this is leading to a narrower view of where progress is most important.

A steady-state model of innovation based on continuous, long-term investment would alter the dynamics of the hype-cycle considerably. Research and development teams would be less reliant on gaining the interest of venture-capital funds and more reliant on demonstrating widely-applicable, socially useful research over a longer time period.

This more considered cycle of innovation would create useful friction, allowing time to evaluate the ethical implications of a technology or product in more detail, including its environmental and social impact. Too often, this work has to be done in the aftermath of innovation – as is now happening with generative AI – as ethics-focused researchers work to catch up to implementation. It would also open up time for the design of products and services to move beyond minimum viable product, to become higher-quality experiences that meet the needs of more diverse groups of people.

For designers, slowing product release cycles would make room for meaningful advances rather than putting pressure on brands to either hype up iterative updates as revolutionary progress, or forcing teams to come up with something ostensibly new and exciting for the sake of filling a press event.

Smartphones are a prime example. According to a 2023 Deloitte study, 3 in 10 smartphones in the UK are now at least 30 months old, suggesting that the upgrade cycle is slowing, even as tech brands continue to launch new devices every year and introduce new formats, such as foldables, to maintain consumer interest. Andrew Lanxon, editor-at-large at tech website CNET, has called for brands to release new phones less often in order to lessen their environmental impact and "make phones exciting again."

Brands have started to adjust their approach, but the economic incentive of an annual release cycle makes it difficult to break entirely. Notably, at Apple's September launch event the iPhone 15 received a grand unveiling but the event's other big headline was the company's sustainability update, which included the announcement of a carbon-neutral Watch.

For much of the 21st century, tech has owned the idea of innovation in the eyes of the public

The tech industry, as epitomised for the past few decades by Silicon Valley, has built its reputation on introducing exciting new ideas that shape how we see the future and how we want to live our lives. For much of the 21st century, tech has owned the idea of innovation in the eyes of the public, and brands may see moving away from the hype-cycle completely as an existential threat.

But over-accelerated hype-cycles are creating a bubbly and unstable innovation landscape in which meaningful advances are overshadowed, sustainability is sidelined and design approaches that value long-term positive impact are swept aside. It's time to rethink the cycle, and invest time and resources where advances really matter.

Sarah Housley is a writer, researcher, consultant and speaker specialising in the future of design and ethical innovation. She is former head of consumer tech at trend forecaster WGSN.

The photo is by Rayson Tan via Unsplash.

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Designers and architects must start taking human-rights violations in the supply chain more seriously, writes Talia Radford.

Designers and architects must start prioritising human rights in their work. Upcoming human-rights due diligence laws mean that European companies will finally be held accountable for human-rights violations along the supply chain. This will directly link our design decisions to the dignity and welfare of workers along distribution channels worldwide and revolutionise how we design products and buildings.

Germany's new act on corporate due diligence to prevent human-rights violations in the supply chain came into effect on 1 January 2023 and is closely followed by a similar EU directive expected to come into effect around 2025.

European companies will finally be held accountable for human-rights violations along the supply chain

Intellectual-property laws that enable companies to withhold information about their supply chains in the interest of commercial competitiveness currently make it difficult to trace materials back to the source. The new supply chain law from Germany and soon the EU will require large companies to publish information about sustainability and human-rights due diligence – meaning that for the first time, the sources of the materials in products and buildings will become public knowledge.

Monitoring mechanisms can help designers choose their source companies, but on their own are not enough. Internal monitoring usually serves to raise brand awareness, not to highlight a brand's lack of human-rights protection. Meanwhile, one of the independent Corporate Human Rights Benchmark's leading iron-ore mining companies recently committed human-rights violations by destroying an indigenous site tens of thousands of years old.

The question is why human-rights violations occur in the supply chain in the first place. We can trace it back to the logic of extractivism, which is a continuation of the colonial logic of extraction and exploitation of resources – including labour and raw materials – for the benefit of specific economic goals. Examples of human-rights violations present in the extractivist logic of the supply chain include forced displacement, modern slavery, child labour, and death.

Today, more than half of the world's 100 largest economies are not states, but corporations. And because international human-rights laws, treaties and standards have so far been a contract to hold states accountable for their actions, corporations have so far been immune to international human-rights standards.

Which brings me to the screw. The simple, invisible, ubiquitous commodity that every designer has come into contact with at least once on every project. I know I carry around a random collection in my handbag.

The screw is a prime example of the opacity of the supply chain.

Steel, a huge global commodity that sets standards, sparks trade wars and is arguably the most important material in the industrial revolution to date, is made up of a plethora of materials depending on the required performance characteristics, including aluminium, boron, bismuth, cobalt, chromium, copper, lanthanum, manganese, molybdenum, niobium, nickel, lead, selenium, silicon, tellurium, titanium, vanadium, tungsten, and zirconium, as well as iron, carbon, phosphorus, sulphur, and nitrogen, not all of which are available at national level.

The screw is a prime example of the opacity of the supply chain

It is thanks to extractivist logic that steel companies are among the largest corporations and economies in the world.
Today's version of extractivist logic can be partly traced back to the 1990s, when a whole swarm of free-trade agreements emerged under the umbrella of the World Trade Organisation. The mechanisms created are still used today by corporations to legally and completely undermine and disregard all codified and substantive anti-discriminatory international human-rights treaties and laws. Of particular interest is the Investor-State Dispute Settlement mechanism (ISDS).

The ISDS mechanism essentially gives corporations the ability to challenge through legal action any new national policies of host countries – including domestic labour laws mandating decent working conditions or environmental regulations limiting air and water pollution – if they could reduce the corporation's expected profits.

It is why, for example, the German state was unable to stop RWE's coal mining expansion that began this year in Lützerath and had to use police force to protect RWE's private property against numerous protestors, including Greta Thunberg. The contract for Lützerath was signed in the mid-1990s.

It is also why mining giant Rio Tinto defaced a 46,000-year-old Aboriginal cultural heritage site in 2020 to expand its iron ore mining operations, and the only damage to its business was to thoroughly reconsider its position towards the Aboriginal community. In many experts' view, the destruction of important cultural sites is a human-rights violation.

It is also why, when the tailings dam at Brumadinho collapsed in 2019 spilling toxic mine sludge into the surrounding area and the Paraopeba River, killing nearly 300 workers instantly and destroying the livelihoods of surrounding farmers, iron ore giant Vale merely agreed to pay compensation and continued operations undisturbed.

When China Molybdenum was accused of lying about its earnings from cobalt mining by the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), to which the company is contractually obliged to pay a percentage of its annual profits, this can be viewed as a potential human-rights violation, as a country uses its taxes to provide, develop, and maintain basic services such as water, food, and travel infrastructure, education, medical facilities.

An equal and just world is literally at our fingertips through our design choices

All these companies are in some way connected to the steel industry, and therefore to the manufacture of screws. You can see how these violations ultimately feed into our products, since steel is omnipresent, whether in the form of a screw, a manufacturing mould, or a tool used to make our products and buildings.

Our built environment embodies violations against human beings, but it could be designed to protect the dignity of everyone. The creation of an equal and just world is literally at our fingertips through our design choices.

Of course, there are practical steps for change to address human-rights concerns. One: research and select suppliers with a commitment to fair labour practices. Two: collaborate with local communities to ensure their rights are respected during construction projects. Three: advocate for ethical sourcing and production standards within the industry.

But designers are in a position to do more than just research, monitor and report on supply chain due diligence issues. When it comes to redesigning globalisation, we can take inspiration from design studio Formafantasma's work ethic. When it comes to supply chain research, Formafantasma has set a precedent with its investigative projects such as Cambio, Ore Streams, and Oltre Terra. In doing so, it has consistently emphasised the need for a thorough exploration that spans months if not years, and that the redesign of the supply chain is part of its service to the brands it works with.

Taking time to reflect on our professional place in the world and our impact and using that time to understand the full scope and scale of a project in socio-economic, geo-political, and socio-environmental terms – in other words human-rights-centred design – would be ideal.

Failing that, or until full transparency of the supply chain is achieved, designers are people with a voice, and taking political action in the form of activism and advocacy by pressuring the government through writing letters, mounting demonstrations and raising public awareness is the human right of any person living in a functioning democracy.

Talia Radford is a designer and human-rights advocate based in Austria. She is co-founder of Creative Human Rights Practice. Her @m.e.t.a.l.m.o.r.p.h.o.s.i.s Instagram account explores the ethical implications of the metal screw.

The photo is by Konstantin Evdokimov.

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Dezeen editorial director Max Fraser reflects on this year's LDF, touted by organisers as a full revival of the UK's biggest design festival post-Covid.

London Design Festival (LDF) director Ben Evans launched this year's nine-day programme with the optimistic declaration: "This is probably the first year that we're properly back to normal."

He was referring to the post-pandemic revival of energy and participation witnessed by other major design weeks this year in places like Milan, New York and Copenhagen. And while an abundance of exhibitions, installations and talks were vying for attention this year, there was a noticeable casualty of the pandemic that has struggled to return to the capital: trade fairs.

Cast your mind back to 2019 and LDF was celebrating four key "design destinations" in the city: Design London, Designjunction, Focus, and London Design Fair. Each with their own identity and raison d'etre, these hub events acted as the commercial backbone of the festival and, in many cases, would have provided the business incentive for many international visitors to London. Competition between them was fierce, as they each fought to attract design brands to exhibit across their vast square meterage and strived to carve out a distinct offering from each other.

There was a noticeable casualty of the pandemic that has struggled to return

With the arrival of Covid-19, all shows were forcibly halted in 2020. In the years since then, Designjunction has ceased, Design London soldiered on in 2021 and 2022 but not this year (the show will merge into Clerkenwell Design Week in May 2024). Focus, a week-long focal event for the permanent showrooms located at Design Centre Chelsea Harbour, continued but is no longer listed as part of the LDF programme. London Design Fair halted for three years before resuming this year without any competition.

As confidence returns to the market, the opportunity was prime for London Design Fair to commandeer the foremost trade fair position during LDF. London still needs a strong commercial hub. Despite mostly filling the cavernous Truman Brewery halls in Brick Lane, what emerged was a show that lacked a clear point of view and failed to lure in a concentration of the leading British furniture and lighting brands or their international counterparts.

On my visit, the experience of meandering through the aisles felt rather lacklustre and predictable. Exhibitors, some of questionable quality, were confined within the standard booth format and illuminated with stark, cold light. This was temporarily brightened by the cheerful You Can Sit With Us showcase, curated by 2LG Studio, which invited a selection of the studio's design friends to "bring their unique voices together around a large table" by contributing a characterful dining-chair design "to represent their identity". For a more established studio to use its platform to extend a hand to emerging designers felt generous and supportive of the wider community in which it operates.

An altogether more enticing and energetic celebration of materiality took place on the South Bank with Material Matters returning for its second year. Intimate in scale thanks to its relatively small roomscapes spread across five floors, the show brought together a well-edited mix of independent designers and emerging brands alongside more established companies with one thing in common: material exploration.

Refreshingly, the show embodied a growing urgency across the design industry to take greater responsibility when adding new products to the market, as part of our wider duty to reduce our ecological impact. This story was told by all exhibitors, and the products on display acted as a physical manifestation of positive change that is burgeoning in design. Just making more stuff for the sake of it now feels truly redundant – purpose is everything.

Material Matters dares to rattle the status quo by creating an optimistic forum for new material experimentations to be showcased and for learnings to be discussed. Gone are the days when designers create new products from whichever globally-traded material they fancy, focussed only on form, function and user experience. Or at least that's what it felt like here.

Just making more stuff for the sake of it now feels truly redundant

To some extent, the exhibition symbolises a much broader movement that is placing strong emphasis on the provenance of raw materials, the methods and conditions by which they are grown, mined or processed, the transparency of the supply chain, working conditions and distribution models, as well as the processes of reuse, repair and recycling.

All of these concerns were embodied by the Material Change showcase, staged at Material Matters by London-based design studio PearsonLloyd. The studio positioned its commitment to a new set of design principles by presenting "ongoing research to improve the circularity of the mass-produced products for which we are responsible". It displayed some of its products as case studies, each representing the areas of research it has undertaken, informed by data, waste materials, new technologies, bio-based materials, self-assembly, mono-materials, repair, and longevity, with the aim to reduce the planetary burden of its designs. As the circular economy enters the mainstream, considering what happens to a product at the end of its usable life is no longer a nicety but a necessity.

And while hard-hitting talks about the future trajectory of design and wider society took place in multiple venues across the city, not everything on show came with an existential question. LDF has always acted as a platform for experimentation and, while nowhere near the extent of Milan design week, pockets of young design talent could still find space to show, with more than 10 "design districts" acting as hotspots for displays in showrooms and studios across the capital.

The longest-standing and a particular favourite is Brompton Design District, which continued to champion experimental design across its pop-up programme dotted around various spaces in the affluent South Kensington area. Particular highlights included The Farm Shop, curated by Marco Campardo, Guan Lee and Luca Lo Pinto for Fels Gallery, wherein invited designers were asked to collaborate on elements of a dining tableau, made during a residency at Grymsdyke Farm in nearby Buckinghamshire. Emerging designer Rio Kobayashi presented his first solo exhibition Manus Manum Lavat (One Hand Washes the Other), and Royal College of Art design products masters graduates displayed their recent work.

With events spread far and wide across London, it remains impossible to find the time to see everything. The geography of the city is sprawling and travel distances are frustrating. How LDF can make its mark on the city is a perpetual challenge – does the festival aim to serve those already in the know, or can it attract the broader population of London? It can never dominate the city in the same way that design weeks in smaller, more concentrated cities such as Milan and Copenhagen manage. Its solution has been to insert site-specific installations in public and often iconic spaces to attract as many people as possible, a route pursued since LDF's inception in 2003.

I finished the week feeling like Evans' opening remark was probably correct

With sponsorship for such activities less forthcoming since the pandemic, the festival should be applauded for commissioning the mesmerising Aura by Spanish artist Pablo Valbuena (pictured), which transformed the ambient sounds in St Paul's Cathedral into a pulsating line of light. Similarly hypnotic was Moritz Waldemeyer's Halo installation in the historic St Stephen Walbrook church. Both projects would have put "design" in the path of a wider audience, perhaps unexpectedly. However, it was notable that no such grand interventions graced the festival's traditional hub venue of the V&A this year.

And while the commercial side of the design industry might have approached LDF with caution this year – with several European brands seemingly regurgitating presentations originally shown at Milan in April and international visitors noticeably missing – I finished the week feeling like Evans' opening remark was probably correct. This year's LDF generally felt energetic and optimistic and, dare I say, on the path to something resembling normality.

The photography is by Ed Reeve.

London Design Festival took place from 16 to 24 September. See our LDF 2023 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks that took place throughout the festival.

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If design is about solving problems we need to start questioning whether new products and furniture are always the answer, writes Katie Treggiden.

"What's new?" is often the first question a journalist asks of a design brand when stepping onto their stand at a trade show or beginning an interview.

Annual stylistic tweaks have driven unnecessary upgrades to cars since the concept was introduced by General Motors in 1923. The emergence of pre-packaged food and disposable drinks bottles in the mid-20th century enabled people to buy instead of make, replace instead of repair, and reclassify objects and materials as waste, rather than holding on to them as resources. This made ordinary people feel rich, fuelling an insatiable desire for the new.

There has already been a real shift towards designers using waste or "second-life" materials

In her 1999 book Waste and Want: A Social History of Trash, Susan Strasser coined the term "the veneration of newness". It is a phenomenon that emerged in 1950s America, ushering in the throwaway culture that came to define the second half of the 20th century and continues today with fast fashion, fast furniture and even fast tech.

It's time for change. The design industry needs to let go of its obsession with the new and instead start venerating the patina of age, and lead the transition to a circular economy.

The second tenet of the circular economy, as defined by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, is to "keep materials and objects in use". There has already been a real shift towards designers using waste or "second-life" materials and talk of "design for disassembly". We've started to get our heads around the idea of keeping materials in use, but what about the objects themselves?

Fashion might have led the design industry towards "fast furniture", but it's also leading the way back towards repair. British brand Toast now employs as many repair specialists as it does designers, and not only offers clothes-swapping events and repair services, but also Toast Renewed – a collection of repaired clothes and home accessories.

The pieces cost more than their original RRP, adding value to stock that would have once been destined for outlet stores and demonstrating a business model for repair. "As a matter of integrity, brands have a responsibility to incorporate repair, rental or resale into their business models," said Toast's Madeleine Michell. "These steps come with challenges, but they are essential for a transition towards a more circular system."

We need to start questioning whether new products and furniture are always the answer

Raeburn is another fashion brand built on circular principles. It was launched in 2009 with a collection of eight garments made from a single pilot's parachute and has continued the themes of reuse and repair to this day. "It's apparent that repair and mending is becoming part of the mainstream again," founder Christopher Raeburn told me. "I'd like to think that the future will see repair celebrated as it used to be, but it's also important that this comes in tandem with better product design."

A handful of product and furniture brands are starting to take note. TAKT launched Spoke (pictured), a sofa that is designed for repair, during Copenhagen's 3 Days of Design in June. "The change we need is to design products that have exposed, visible fixings that can be operated with simple, accessible tools – if tools are required at all," said its designer Tørbjorn Anderssen. "We need to ensure that recyclable mono-materials are used wherever possible and we need to provide customers with spare parts that extend the life of products."

If design is about solving problems, perhaps we need to start questioning whether new products and furniture are always the answer. "We don't make lights, we find them" is the strapline of Skinflint – a certified B Corp that has saved more than 50,000 vintage lights from landfill.

The brand salvages lamps from the 1920s to the 1970s, restores them to modern safety standards and then offers a lifetime guarantee, repair service and buy-back scheme. "We've demonstrated that a fully circular approach to lighting is absolutely possible," said founder Chris Miller. "And we hope that other leaders in the industry will follow suit, bringing change to the sector as a whole."

If we can stop asking "what's new?" and instead celebrate what isn't, perhaps we can let go of a 20th-century model that is no longer serving us, and lead the way in the transition to a circular economy.

Katie Treggiden is the founder and director of Making Design Circular, a membership community and online-learning platform for sustainable designers and makers, and the author of Broken: Mending and Repair in a Throwaway World (Ludion, 2023).

The photography is by Claudia Vega.

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Designers and brands must get thinking now about the simple, immediate changes that can make their products more accessible to people living with disabilities, writes Luc Speisser of Landor & Fitch.

We cannot continue to unintentionally exclude the one-billion people living on this planet who are experiencing some form of disability.

This gigantic minority is so often let down by design. It's not enough to conceive truly inclusive products from the start, a process that normally takes two to five years, if not more. All of us – businesses, brands, designers – need to find solutions today. Because people living with disabilities are done waiting for accessible designs.

All of us – businesses, brands, designers – need to find solutions today

There is a lot that can be done to make brands and products more accessible right now.

Small shifts make a huge difference, and every element contributes to the accessibility of a product or a brand. From how it looks, to how it talks, feels, sounds, speaks and reads, every sensory element is an opportunity.

If you don't know where to start, a good first question is: can colour improve someone's experience? British bank Barclays, for example, changed the colour of its digital touchpoints to cyan from light blue, greatly improving its visibility.

Or perhaps it can be the incorporation of additional colours into a palette to aid legibility while also enhancing the overall visual impact of the brand. Accessibility upgrades like these are easy thanks to a number of online resources like Color Safe, Colorable, and Contrast Grid, and are a great starting point for any accessible design journey.

This leads nicely to another question: how accessible is your verbal brand? Typographic treatment can be on-brand while also improving legibility. This could be adjustments to scale, kerning and capitalisation. Again, there are plenty of resources are out there to support design choices, such as OpenDyslexic and Focus Ex.

Readability can also be improved beyond typographic style. Proctor & Gamble's Herbal Essences hair-care brand is a great illustration of smart design thinking. By embedding tactile indentations into the packaging, the brand is immediately more accessible to people with partial sight.

Of course, these solutions might already be on the radar of plenty in the design community, but repetition and democratisation can't hurt. What's more, we can go much further.

It is critical to recruit a representative group of the people you want to design for

To avoid bad design in general, and even more so when it comes to people living with disabilities, it is critical to recruit a representative group of the people you want to design for. And, in fact, not design for them but design with them. This is the best and fastest way to check if you are on the right track.

Adopt a one-size-fits-one approach. It takes a two-minute discussion with even a small group of people living with accessibility needs to understand that one-size-fits-all does not work. There are too many different and complex conditions and challenges to cover.

Investing massively to find the perfect product that works for everyone and then mass-producing it could take an eternity and might never work. So why not embrace the ever-improving possibilities offered by online customisation, 3D printing or other emerging technologies?

Forget about launching the perfect solution. Launch and wholeheartedly engage into an iterative process with continuous opportunities to improve and refine. Use your digital platform to consistently collect stats and data to see what people opt for. The one-size-fits-one model makes change super easy, as you are not restrained by a production line that has already been built.

Also, accept the idea that nobody can do it alone and that embracing partnership is not a weakness, but a strength.
Strive for no compromise. Very often when it comes to people living with disabilities, industries have come up with functional products with no regard to aesthetics. Why should accessible design just be functional but not desirable and affordable?

Some brands already understand this and have been leading the charge on accessibility for years, whether that be tackling language barriers, dexterity challenges, or accessible healthcare. This year's Cannes Lions Festival saw great examples of brands realising the importance of accessible design, with nominees shining through in the innovation category.

For designers, it has to become a natural reflex

Giants like Google are using augmented reality to break down communication barriers, bringing technologies like transcription and translation to our line of sight, making connections easier. Meanwhile, the Cannes Lions-winning Ecoclic box from laundry brand Ariel combines innovation and sustainability. The box is fully recyclable, FSC-certified and made from recycled fibres. It is inclusive and intuitive for adults thanks to its two-button ergonomic opening system. Combined with the clear opening instructions, the box is comfortable to open for all adults – including those with dexterity, visual and cognitive impairments.

Then there was our shortlisted Accessories project – a first-of-its-kind accessible oral-care product, comprising bespoke 3D-printed toothbrush add-ons for people with dexterity challenges. The Accessories digital platform allows users to personalise their toothbrush handles, providing an efficient but also equally desirable and affordable solution to a daily but often-unseen barrier.

Making the world a more accessible place, right now, is possible. For businesses and brands, it is an absolute imperative but also a substantial source of additional revenue. For designers, it has to become a natural reflex; the very foundation of our approach. Let us end with Verna Myers' great words: "Diversity is being invited to the party; inclusion is being asked to dance." So, let's all dance together.

Luc Speisser is global chief innovation officer at Landor & Fitch.

The photo, showing Accessories, is by Si Cox.

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A recent documentary about The Line mega-project in Saudi Arabia paints a bleak picture of the architecture profession, writes Dana Cuff.

I've often been frustrated that architects are sidelined in the delivery of much-needed new housing. We are left to compete for commissions with design results bound by a priori constraints. Wouldn't it open up far more and far better possibilities to involve architects – the most skilled in site planning, material and building technology, and housing design – from the beginning?

The Line promised to be just such an opportunity for architects to design the future, with innovative solutions for sustainability and housing for all. How did it go so drastically wrong?

The documentary shows The Line concept, along with our profession, diminished

Saudi Arabia has so much money that it's willing to try everything. Couple that with the fact that architects have so little money that they appear to be willing to do anything, and you have a recipe for The Line.

In a recent documentary, Saudi Arabian crown prince Mohammed bin Salman delivers an affable, in-your-living-room story hour, in which he parades no fewer than 25 architects and other experts to enthusiastically persuade viewers that the 170-kilometer-long futuristic development will create neighborhoods for everyone, will save the planet, and is the first real utopia since the 1964 Plug-In City by Archigram.

The documentary is simultaneously a portrait of The Line and the architectural profession. Its storyline is largely delivered by the architects working on The Line, led by Archigram founder Peter Cook and Morphosis principal Thom Mayne.

The cast is nearly all-male and all-white (of the 25 people featured, 14 men speak multiple times before the first of just five women appears). Call me a bean-counter rather than a poet – a disparaging distinction that Cook wields – but it's easy to see that any world-making by The Line will remain unchallenged from the point of view of privilege, race, youth, income, or gender. As Tom Ravenscroft noted in June, The Line is the vision of architects who are overwhelmingly pale, male and stale.

Completely missing from the narrative are any engineers, scientists, historians, economists or environmentalists – relegating architects to producing cinematic CGI set decoration without intellectual foundation. How, in current times, does a future city seem plausible, let alone provocative, without some very serious climate scientists and racially diverse leadership? Even if those consultants are behind-the-scenes, it would take some serious magic to transform the thin future currently envisioned into a robust social and sustainable proposition.

The documentary shows The Line concept, along with our profession, diminished. Why would architects let themselves be so vitiated? When all that Saudi money meets a profession growing increasingly poor by many measures, even the biggest reputations in the field are opportunists. What we see is a hostage video, where the Stockholm syndrome appears to have taken hold of the talking heads. Any discussion of the controversy surrounding the project, including reported death sentences for protestors which have prompted scorn from the UN, is conspicuously absent.

What this documentary presents as just some fun among the old guard might actually be architecture's kiss of death

A lot of architects in the major cities of America and Europe have been sucked into The Line, with the prospects of earnings, fame, and comradery. What this documentary presents as just some fun among the old guard might actually be architecture's kiss of death. Leave aside the design-washing as Bin Salman seeks to repair his reputation post-Khashoggi, or greenwashing of the kingdom's fossil-fuel earnings, and consider what architecture offers for the future at this particular historical moment.

The documentary is filled with yesterday's tomorrow, pictured in nostalgic 20th-century footage of the 1939 NY World's Fair where Norman Bel Geddes designed the Futurama exhibition with highways and skyscrapers pointing toward the future, and of a housewife planting a thankful kiss on her husband for giving her a new station wagon. A short clip of a girls' soccer team presents the only Black face in a stream of anachronistic imagery. For Neom, and by implication for the design profession, today's tomorrow is unburdened by the science of global warming or gender discrimination, race, class or poverty.

The future world they envision seems as dull and naive as other utopias in comparison to the fraught, complex, intricate real world it seeks to replace. The current reality lived by architects who can be held hostage for cash and a chance to deliver some heroic vision is bleak, but it's impossible to feel sorry for them. How radically optimistic is a very different, complex future where architects take responsibility for housing that is affordable, advancing equity, and reducing greenhouse gases? Where we confer with the wonks, the beancounters, and the poets, to listen, learn and exact our highest talents on behalf of a greater good.

In that world, race, gender, science, creativity and politics are all recognizable ingredients that will open the world we want to live in. Now that is the future we have to imagine.

Dana Cuff is director of cityLAB and a professor of architecture and urban design at the University of California, Los Angeles.

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Discussions about planning and urbanism are awash with talk of "placemaking" but the term remains strangely and troublingly opaque, writes Reinier de Graaf.

UK housing secretary Michael Gove is backing the creation of a new "School of Place"; the city of San Francisco has adopted a placemaking ordinance called "Places for People"; Edinburgh Council has invited the public to participate in a "placemaking consultation". Vancouver organizes a "Placemaking Week"; Bangalore has a "Placemaking Weekend". New York City promotes "creative placemaking", Ontario, "neighborhood placemaking", while Auckland connects placemaking to "Aroha" – the Mauri word for love for all things, living and otherwise.

I have a confession to make: I have no idea what "placemaking" is. The more I hear the word, the less I understand it. What is placemaking? The word, for one, does not feature in any English dictionary and, until recently, was underlined by Microsoft Word as a spelling mistake. Entering the term into the Oxford English Dictionary delivers no match, neither does the Cambridge Online Dictionary, while Thesaurus.com politely offers the help of a grammar coach.

The more I hear the word, the less I understand it

The first internet site that comes close to attempting a definition is Wikipedia. "Additional citations or verification" are needed, but placemaking, I learn, is: "A multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. It capitalizes on a local community's assets, inspiration, and potential, with the intention of creating public spaces that promote people's health, happiness, and well-being." The explanation continues: "Placemaking is both a process and a philosophy that makes use of urban design principles. It can be either official and government-led, or community-driven grass roots tactical urbanism, such as extending sidewalks with chalk, paint, and planters, or open streets events such as Bogotá, Colombia's Ciclovía."

For more information the page redirects me to pps.org, the official website of Project for Public Spaces, "a cross-disciplinary non-profit organization that shares a passion for public spaces", otherwise defined as a "Project for Sunday afternoons, walking your dog, running into friends, people watching, and losing track of time". The website helpfully includes a page titled "What is Placemaking?", but the answer – identical to one above – has me caught in a causal loop. The note of caution on the Wikipedia page was there for good reason.

The lack of an unequivocal meaning has hardly been in the way of the term's popularity. Proper definition or not, placemaking appears to be the ideology of choice both within the public and the private sector.

In the UK, real-estate agents like Savills highlight the "importance of placemaking" as the prime feature valued by homeowners. Similarly, JLL offers their insight into what shapes the "meaningful places we all value". For developers, placemaking is the perfect business formula – a suitably cost-effective mode to maximize the return of new developments. Creative Placemaking: Sparking Development with Arts and Culture, a 2020 paper by the Urban Land Institute, identifies placemaking as "a differentiator that can produce distinctive and successful real-estate projects and can turn developments into destinations".

The explanation of how exactly this works is as elaborate as it is vague: "Development that demonstrates best practices in creative placemaking provides models for public/private partnerships, creative financing, and return on investment for a wide range of projects, from low-cost pop-ups that create a buzz for future development, to larger mixed-use projects ranging from US$250 million to US$1 billion in value."

What most attempts at describing placemaking disturbingly have in common is that rather than tell us about placemaking, they mostly seem to argue for placemaking, without ever properly revealing why. The object of worship finds its legitimacy in the worshipping – and we have no choice but to go along.

Like a virus, placemaking seems to be able to develop mutational strands

Already placemaking is a major part of the nomenclature of urban governance, reflected in the titles of an ever-larger number of public officials: "head of placemaking", "director of place", "placemaking officer", "chief placemaking officer", "placemaker", "principle placemaker"… As the job descriptions multiply, the expertise proliferates. Like a virus, placemaking seems to be able to develop mutational strands over time: there is healthy placemaking, creative placemaking, strategic placemaking, tactical placemaking, digital placemaking as well as Afrocentric placemaking.

For all the apparent enthusiasm, placemaking doesn't always err on the side of logic: Bryant Park in New York City, "a place for people", prohibits riding bicycles, feeding pigeons, sitting on balustrades, selling goods, or organizing demonstrations; the "place-centered revitalized" downtown Detroit belongs to one man and the "non-place urban realm", of Milton Keynes, is meanwhile overseen by a Strategic Placemaking Committee.

I too, have done projects under the guise of placemaking. Mea culpa. I've sat through hours and hours of planning sessions dedicated to the subject, featuring equally in the objectors' arguments as it did in their rebuttal. Placemaking proved a term that can be levelled for and against projects – at once a voice of criticism and support. How wonderful! I wonder if that perhaps is the whole point – a lack of definition that enables a consensus between opposing interest, one that frees people from having to see eye-to-eye and allows business to continue as usual.

We can read into the term whatever we want. Its meaning is a matter of private conviction. Like the existence of God, placemaking cannot be verified, nor should it. I still do not know what placemaking is; I doubt if anyone does. I wonder if anyone wants to.

The photo is by Krisztina Papp.

Reinier de Graaf is a Dutch architect and writer. He is a partner in the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) and co-founder of its think-tank AMO. He is the author of Four Walls and a Roof: The Complex Nature of a Simple Profession, the novel The Masterplan, and most recently Architect, verb: The New Language of Building.

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The inauguration of Muyiwa Oki as RIBA president must become a moment of real, positive change in British architecture, writes Marsha Ramroop.

One-hundred-and-eighty-nine years ago, men whose shadows fill Florence Hall, and whose legacies are absorbed into those walls, founded an institute. They had a vision for an architecture profession that was progressive, necessary and relevant.

One-hundred years later, the Portland Place building opened its magnificent bronze doors Usui civium decori urbium – "for the use of the people, for the glory of the city".

Eighty-nine years on from that, Muyiwa Oki stands as the Royal Institute of British Architects' (RIBA) 80th president, and his very presence forces the architecture profession to confront the questions: are we progressive? Are we necessary? Are we relevant? Is this profession well used by the people? Do we bring glory to our cities?

We can't simply look to Oki alone for change

The criticism that has faced RIBA most recently – at least, the one word that reverberates off the lips of all I meet – is that it is "irrelevant". And yet, the Future Architects Front campaign which elevated Oki to the biggest job in the profession has given us all pause for thought. If we're to ask one man to turn this around, that's a heavy task indeed.

The impression this profession makes on communities, society, lives, means the charitable mission set out in the RIBA charter, "to advance architecture by demonstrating public benefit and promoting excellence in the profession", is one of huge impact, and so requires us all involved across architecture to carry out introspection.

And the weight of this history and the weight of this story bears heavier because he is a first. He is a Black man. He is a young man. He is a man early in his career in comparison with those who have held this position before him. But he can bear this weight of responsibility if we recognise it's one that we must share among all of us. We can't simply look to Oki alone for change, especially because a cynic would be waiting, even facilitating, a trip up.

The institute is not a building. The institute is the people and the profession. The institute existed before 66 Portland Place, and exists across the country, and across the world.

Architects choosing to become active, progressive members in the institute can set themselves the task of delivering on that vision, and holding firm to the charitable mission, and to bring others on the journey. To do otherwise is to fail – fail the profession, fail the public, fail society. And while we can take lessons and learn from failure, we should first be doing everything we can to succeed.

There have been 189 years of opportunity to establish architecture as a relevant visionary profession for the benefit of the public. We all need to do this better as we look forward.

It's more useful to speak of what we all need to see and do in this profession

We can predict the future we create, says Peter Drucker. We need to decide what new stories we will tell, what new histories do we forge? What new futures do we face?

I don't know how useful it is to speak of the next two years or any personal legacy. It's more useful to speak of what we all need to see and do in this profession, now, tomorrow and thereafter as a continuing endeavour.

So, let's make a prediction now, and hold ourselves accountable for creating it, aligning with Oki's platform and presidency.

We must all agree everything we do should be sustainable – in balance with the planet, in harmony with the earth. Net zero is not enough. As a profession, architecture must be innovating and advocating for carbon-negative impacts. Let's share, develop, test and improve these ideas together.

There is no future that isn't inclusive of all those the profession serves. Everyone. In our interconnected globalised world, nothing we do is without consequence for others. Let's recognise that we have widening gender pay gaps in practices and reverse them.

Let's acknowledge we have issues with racial dynamics and progression in the profession and challenge them. Let's address that there are too few disabled people with access to architecture and invite them. Let's use the power to design inclusion into our buildings, and welcome all.

Let's commit to using the Inclusive Design overlay to the RIBA Plan of Work as a prerequisite, and deliver on it. If the Plan of Work without the overlay is not inclusive, we should ask ourselves, for what reason would we not use the overlay?

We need to rise from conversation to tangible, useful action

We must address the issue of colleagues overworked, under-paid. Harassment, bullying, sexism, racism, homophobia, ableism – if it's in your personal and organisational behaviours, it's in your design. None of these things have a place in the profession and we must all act to eradicate them now.

We have come to this place and this time to remind ourselves of the "fierce urgency of now", in the words of Martin Luther King Jr. "This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism."

Now is the time to make real the promises of progress. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of the reports and outcomes that have dogged our recent history to the sunlit path of justice for people, place and planet. Now is the time to lift our profession from the quicksands of injustice to the solid rock of shared humanity. Now is the time to make spatial justice a reality for all.

As Oki said in his opening communications as president: be agent of change and take responsibility for this. We have the tools, the allies and the skills, and we can use this moment to create a movement and maintain momentum for change.

This has to be more than a dream. More than a hope. It has to be an expectation. An obligation. A stipulation. We need to rise from conversation to tangible, useful action. Demonstrating architecture for public benefit, and its relevance and validity, and to grow the engagement of all our fellow professionals in this mission.

If we want a different future, we need a different message. Collaboration, collegial relationships, compromise. These are not dirty words. Together we can believe in the agency of our own hand to deliver a better way, an inspiring future, a transformative impact.

And when we deliver, when we can look back at this moment, when we can be truly satisfied in the iterated structures that we have developed for ourselves, we will be able to say we accepted our mission "to advance architecture by demonstrating public benefit and promoting excellence in the profession", and the heavy weight of unfulfilled history will be lifted. And the lightness of change, with which we will all walk, will be a testament to a profession of inclusivity, sustainability, ethics, safety and fairness.

The photography is courtesy of the RIBA.

Marsha Ramroop is founder of consultancy Unheard Voice, executive director of equity, diversity and inclusion at Building People CIC, vice chair of the Institute of Equality and Diversity Professionals and an international advisory council member at the Institute of Business Ethics. She was the RIBA's first director of inclusion and diversity from February 2021 to June 2022 and previously worked as a journalist for the BBC.

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AI should be embraced by architects rather than met with scepticism or fear, writes Zaha Hadid Architects principal Patrik Schumacher.

Since Open AI's DALL-E 2 became available to early adopters – including Zaha Hadid Architects (ZHA) – about 18 months ago, this and similar artificial intelligence (AI) systems have taken the world of architecture by storm. The same has happened in many other design disciplines and artistic professions.

These recent AI systems enjoyed the fastest adoption growth rates in history, and the enthusiasm is justified. Everybody using these systems enjoys a momentous boost in productivity and creativity.

AI systems have taken the world of architecture by storm

To answer critics, such as The Guardian's architecture critic Oliver Wainwright, who think all this can be dismissed as superficial because it works via mere image generation, I would like to remind us that a picture can speak a thousand words. From these coherent images we can create a well-articulated spatial composition, and also get input about the plastic articulation and material expression of the building.

To be sure, the non-trivial art of prompting and selection must be learned and mastered to get convincing results. Those who do not understand the importance of articulate visual communication for architecture's social functioning have missed one of the most important lessons of the history and theory of architecture. Kevin Lynch's evergreen classic The Image of the City underpins my point, a point I have elaborated extensively in my writings on architectural phenomenology and semiology.

The image is very important. However, ZHA, and our discipline more generally, also embraces and actively invests in a broader conception of AI that goes beyond the technique of neural networks.

It was exactly 40 years ago that I started my architectural studies in Stuttgart University. At the time, artificial intelligence was still relatively young. However, generative computational processes were already being explored within architecture by George Stiny at UCLA/MIT, Horst Rittel and Frei Otto at Stuttgart University, Bill Hillier at the Bartlett, and John Frazer at the Architectural Association, to name just some of the pioneers I had the pleasure to be touched by or interact with personally.

Although neural networks were already around in those early days, the above-mentioned trailblazers developed, before big data, intelligent generative methods based on explicit theory-based programming (as well as evolutionary algorithms) and focused on organisational-functional optimisation.

At ZHA we are investing in long term research-and-development projects and teams in this broad tradition, with special focus on both generative and analytic space planning tools (including machine-learning tools) and agent-based occupancy simulations using gaming AI, writing original code in our effort to build potent design-optimisation software focused on social functionality.

I always welcome competition as a catalyst of self-improvement

More recently we have initiated a research project aiming to develop a game-based methodology and toolset meant to facilitate participatory urban development and community creation. All of these new tools not only increase our labour productivity and efficiency, but also enhance the quality of our professional services, enabling works and insights that simply could not be had before.

With respect to the most recent wave of big-data-based AI tools, the worry has been articulated that AI will make many jobs within architecture redundant, or altogether replace or devalue our profession.

I do not share this worry. The historical experience with earlier productivity leaps, i.e. when CAD and CGIs were introduced, was that the productivity gains went into higher quality work, into more options for clients, and thus contributed to better designs and decisions. I foresee the same now with the adoption of AI.

Architectural design fees are a relatively small part of the overall cost of creating a new building. It makes no sense to save here, but it makes a lot of sense to further increase creativity and the number of design options from which to develop solutions. In accordance with economic cost-benefit logic, design fees as a percentage of total project costs has been going up in recent decades and I expect this to continue, moreso the more we innovate and deliver qualitatively new capacities.

Going back to the current excitement about image-focused generative AI, as everybody's creative capacity is boosted by AI, the competition in creative design intensifies. Epigones proliferate and might be hard to distinguish from the original. To be sure, downstream quality execution on time and within budget is much harder to replicate, so that it is relatively easy for us to maintain our overall competitive edge.

But I am also not at all worried about facing the newly empowered competition enabled by AI in terms of front-end design. I always welcome competition as a catalyst of self-improvement.

I am not only concerned with the flourishing of ZHA, but with the flourishing of architecture

In any event, we have been embracing these new tools from the get-go, for our own further empowerment. ZHA has the unique advantage that these huge general purpose systems have gobbled up more images from ZHA than from any other architect, which in turn allows us to credibly and creatively explore and evolve our own oeuvre with these systems.

While we do this shamelessly, we are also developing our very own tailored neural-network systems, calibrating Stable Diffusion with our own project-image datasets, and adapting it to our own specific architectural needs. We are currently testing various training methodologies.

We are also building new interfacing features and functionalities. We integrate constraints and controls that allow us to steer the output through parameters and direct design inputs. We can also build the output cumulatively and vary some parts while keeping other parts invariant. We can fine-tune outputs with project specific training datasets. We run these models on our own server farm. Our next aim is to generate clusters of images (front/back, outside/inside) that together describe a coherent design.

These are just some hints indicating the direction of our AI research and development trajectory. It's oriented towards upgrading our capabilities and competitive edge, with a view to rapid results because this space is moving so fast. We are also collaborating with universities, e.g. trying to tackle the holy grail of 3D AI.

This is all just a beginning, although the new capabilities are already starting to become compelling. I think it is very important, not only for ZHA, but for the discipline of architecture as a whole, to not only consume generative AI tools as end-users but to get involved in developing discipline-specific versions of these tools.

As always, I am not only concerned with the flourishing of ZHA, but with the flourishing of architecture, the built environment, and its creative contribution to societal progress. It's all part of human flourishing. It's thrilling.

Patrik Schumacher is principal of Zaha Hadid Architects.

The image was created by ZHA using DALL-E 2.

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AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

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It's time for equitable design to become a priority rather than an afterthought, writes Google's Annie-Jean Baptiste.

When you think about equitable design, what does it look like? In my mind, it means everyone being able to move seamlessly throughout spaces without having to think about how their identity might change their approach or reception. This includes a person's age, race, socioeconomic status, whether they have a disability, and more.

Equitable design is about creating a world where products, services and experiences are made for everyone and are helpful to everyone, with a particular focus on groups that have been historically marginalized. It's about creating a world where everyone belongs.

It's not enough to create for one type of person

Equitable design isn't an afterthought. It's imperative to ensure environments work for as many people as possible. When we do that, we create spaces that not only reflect the world around us, but create the space for innovation to blossom. When spaces are inequitable, they stunt ideation, growth and change. Non-inclusive spaces can at the least be alienating, and at most, be harmful and dangerous (hospitals come to mind).

There are many factors that can contribute to making someone feel like they don't belong in a space. For instance, have you ever walked into a store and felt like you were being followed or that you were unwelcome because of your race? Have you ever gone to a restaurant and found that there wasn't enough space for your wheelchair? Have you ever gone to a movie and realized that there weren't subtitles in your language? All of these are examples of experiences that can leave people feeling uncomfortable or unwanted.

It's important to be intentional about designing inclusively and being considerate of every person's identity. All of us have bias, but we must move from intent to impact. It's not enough to create for one type of person. We must build to reflect that world and commit to learning about experiences unlike ours in order to do so.

There are several approaches to creating inclusive and accessible spaces, including being thoughtful about how a space is designed. One of my favorite examples of this is by the Magical Bridge Foundation. Their organization designs and creates playgrounds that center around inclusion across several dimensions, including ability and age. This ensures that people with a variety of identities are able to equitably enjoy the space.

Another aspect of inclusive design in physical spaces could be the presence of adjustable lighting, which can be highly beneficial in a multitude of environments, including workspaces. Adjustable lighting could include dimmable lights or blinds/curtains to regulate the amount of natural light. This type of lighting allows individuals to modify their environment to best suit their visual needs, enhancing comfort and productivity. It can also help all skin tones show up beautifully and accurately by ensuring people have the ability to adjust to what works best for them, whereas non-adjustable lighting can fail to account for darker shades and hues.

Spaces can also be used to celebrate identity. For many historically marginalized groups, having environments to authentically connect to is extremely important, because there's nothing quite like being in a place that was designed with your experience in mind. For the LGBTQ+ community, these types of affinity spaces can cultivate a feeling of belonging. Another example, Black Girl Green House in Oakland, creates spaces for Black women to come together in community.

There are many benefits to having inclusive spaces

While progress is being made, there is so much work that needs to be done.

Consider what a person's experience would be in a space from end-to-end. The physical components are just one aspect of that. When they enter a space, they should be greeted warmly. There should be someone who speaks their language available to help with questions. Signage should be clear and easy to understand, agnostic of reading level. Hallways should be wide enough for wheelchairs. It's worth co-creating with communities that may be most at the margins to ensure that you are creating an inclusive experience for as many people as possible.

There are many benefits to having inclusive spaces. They can not only help to create a more just and equitable society, but, at an individual level, they can also help to improve well-being both physically and mentally, by reducing stress and anxiety. These spaces are able to provide people with a sense of community, belonging, and support.

Creating inclusive spaces allows everyone to thrive and tap into their creativity no matter where they are: in the workplace or in the world. Creating inclusive spaces means developing an environment where everyone feels welcome and respected, regardless of their background, identity, or beliefs. There are many parallels between creating inclusive products and inclusive spaces. Space, in fact, is a physical product that people will interact with, utilize and connect with.

Space that is exclusionary does not live up to its full potential. Better decisions and ideas come from dissent, friction and multiple perspectives getting to a solution that is nuanced and multifaceted. The outcomes are better for everyone when you create spaces where groups that have historically been at the margins feel like they have agency to speak their truth.

When creating inclusive spaces, products or experiences, you must always ask: who else? Who else should be involved? Whose voice needs to be a part of the process? As designers, developers, marketers, and creators, we have an opportunity to create products and services that make people feel seen.

We must admit that we don't know everything, and ensure that we include diverse perspectives

In order to do that, we must admit that we don't know everything, and ensure that we include diverse perspectives, particularly from people who have been historically marginalized, at key points in the process — ideation, research, design, testing, and marketing. This means being humble, asking questions, and letting those with the lived experiences guide the way. Center the experiences of historically marginalized communities, and build with them, not just for them.

It's not enough to build something you would like, because you don't represent the world. When we broaden our perspective and bring in other perspectives, we design, create and innovate for everyone.

The photo is by Red John via Unsplash.

Annie Jean-Baptiste is head of product inclusion and equity at Google and founder of the Equity Army network. Her first book, Building for Everyone, is published by Wiley.

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As wildfires exacerbated by climate change wreak increasing havoc around the world, Greg Kochanowski argues it's time for a different approach.

We now have scientific proof of the ways we have irrevocably changed the territories and climate of this world, putting us on a path where we cannot yet see the ultimate consequences. Wildfires and their negative effects on infrastructure and health are a clear example that more are experiencing worldwide all the time.

The design professions are not stepping up to address the wildfires problem, other than to call for fire-resistant building materials and defensible space. To be sure, these are necessary tactics to be included in any discussion of wildfire response, but are not substitutes for a broader conceptualization of innovative planning, typologies, and disciplinary strategies.

Architecture cannot solve this problem

Architecture cannot solve this problem. In fact, all the individual design professions are incapable of addressing the magnitude of sheer complexity of the climate crisis alone. As much as we need disciplinary expertise, the problem of wildfire, like other climate crises, requires levels of innovation that are not possible to achieve via a single disciplinary orientation.

Thus, what is needed is a new holistic, synthesized, design discipline fusing the ecological systems thinking of landscape architecture, the policy thinking of planning, the cultural and organizational synthetic thinking of architects, and the engineering prowess of civil and environmental engineers.

But this is not enough. Additionally, we need to conceive of a new global narrative or mythology that reinstates the interconnectedness of our planet and the irrelevance of human-centered boundaries, borders, or territories that govern our cultural framing and demarcation separate from the realities of the globe. All design is, or should be, a manifestation of a larger cultural narrative, or zeitgeist, and as such we need to establish a new narrative around the climate crisis that can permeate the human condition towards motivating real change.

Our current crisis has been driven by two main factors: the continued onset of extreme climate conditions and a housing-affordability crisis crippling millions of Americans, including local governments who, due to NIMBYism and local zoning, need to push new housing outside of city centers to comply with state mandates.

My family is not immune to this dynamic. My family lives in the Santa Monica Mountains, north of Malibu, CA, within what is called the Wildland Urban Interface (WUI) – a zone of transition between unoccupied land and human development where insurance companies are continuing to drop coverage for homeowners. With housing development continuing to extend into such areas, the WUI is the fastest-growing land condition in the United States, expanding at a rate of 2 million acres per year and containing 46 million homes in the United States at a value of $1.3 trillion.

Our area of Los Angeles has experienced wildfire for millennia, and its flora and fauna have adapted to these conditions over time. We love living amongst nature, and if we did not live in our community, we would not be able to afford the Los Angeles housing market. In 2018 we lost our home in the Woolsey Fire, along with 109 other homes in our community. We have since rebuilt.

We need to stop living in conflict with our environment

Typically, developing or rebuilding within areas of high risk is seen as irresponsible, and most discourse breaks down between binary questions of "retreat" or "remediation".

"Retreat" from these environments has been defined as the responsible thing to do, both individually and societally. But this is tied to one's own personal circumstances: can someone afford to leave? If they were to leave, what is the value of the property left behind, and can that value be recouped if the consensus is these environments should not be lived in?

Conversely, "remediation" is not really the right term to use in this situation, especially if we define it as "the act of reversing or stopping environmental change". The dynamics of wildfire are not systems that can be reversed as much as we can reverse the trajectory of climate change. These are fire-adapted landscapes that have existed for centuries, so the idea of reversal is a misnomer, as there is no idealized state to go back to.

As such, the notion of managed retreat (moving people to areas of less risk) is disingenuous, and more of a political proposition than one based on the realities of the climate, the power of social infrastructure, and belief in the potential of design innovation. Yet, there is a tendency to blame or degrade people living in areas prone to disaster who then choose to rebuild following the destruction of their homes and livelihood.

Various questions arise, such as: where should these people go? Should we abandon our communities, small towns, and cities? Should we forgo living amongst natural environments for hyper-dense tabula rasa mega-structures (i.e. The Line) as a way of "protecting" ourselves from the extreme climate that we have wrought upon ourselves? This mindset reinforces Western civilization's mythological separation of the human condition from the natural world, and the fallacy that we can continue to control natural forces to suit our needs without any consequence, and that there are places with no risk.

Instead, we need to stop living in conflict with our environment. Many cities in the West were born out of a harnessing of resources – the making of a place – instead of co-existing and adapting to found conditions. Indigenous Americans understood the symbiosis between wildlands and humans and, as such, were able to harness fire to their benefit in complex forms of land management and community organization. So too must we rethink the planning, development and stewardship of our built environment to be more symbiotic and adaptive.

This will require us to see natural forces as something to engage with rather than retreat from

Some of these are practical measures that go beyond the design profession's purview but where we must keep engaging to advocate for innovation. We need more housing co-operatives and community land trusts which empower homeowners, establish resilient affordable housing and provide stronger incentives than commercial development to have proper adaptation and recovery strategies. We need innovative insurance models that create public-private consortiums to promote land stewardship and wildfire mitigation. We need planning policies that encourage clustered development surrounded by land and agricultural buffers rather than single-family houses lined up along roads directly adjacent to wildlands.

We need innovative soft infrastructures and development that work with our changing climate – even extreme versions of it. This will require us to see natural forces as something to engage with rather than retreat from, completely altering the way we occupy this planet and think about design. It will demand a rethinking of spatial, political, technological, and economic strategies at a broad range of scales, from the local to the global, as well as a reframing of priorities and how we consider the role of the designer.

The photography, showing a burned home in Lahaina, is by Zane Vergara via Shutterstock.

Greg Kochanowski is partner and design principal at architecture studio GGA+, founder of research lab The Wild, an adjunct professor in the University of Southern California's School of Architecture and a senior lecturer at Otis College of Art and Design.

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Architects need to rethink their part in Britain's dysfunctional relationship with laundry, writes Phineas Harper.

A tangle of tubes, ducts, and electrical appliances hanging in moist air around a sodden cotton T-shirt is the undisputed highlight of Islands, a new exhibition at the Design Museum. Created by design researcher-in-residence Marianna Janowicz and feminist architecture collective Edit, the exhibit is a monstrous metaphor lampooning Britain's dysfunctional relationship with laundry.

A heater and fan cause water to evaporate from the soggy T-shirt, whereupon a dehumidifier condenses the vapour to liquid again and dribbles it back onto the garment. Titled D.A.M.P. (Drying and Moisture Performance), the piece mocks the highly mechanised and often conflicting processes that Brits are resorting to in order to dry their clothes as drying laundry outside on washing lines becomes increasingly policed.

Edit has been interrogating the architecture of domestic labour including laundry since their 2018 inception. In 2021 they hung pants, shirts and socks on a washing line in front of the RIBA as a provocation challenging conservative attitudes to laundry drying in public. Now Janowicz has taken the design collective's research further – probing the architectural history of laundry in the UK and how it has become shaped by growing anti-working class sentiment.

Britain is increasingly hostile to anyone drying their laundry outside

Across the world, clothes have traditionally been laundered in public. In Europe lavoirs, communal wash houses where garments could be brought for cleaning, were once a common feature of the urban landscape. George-Eugène Haussmann's 1850 redesign of Paris, for example, included lavoirs in every neighbourhood.

Though mechanisation has automated much of the drudgery of hand washing clothes in rich countries, shared laundry facilities are still widespread. "In Switzerland, Sweden and other European countries it is commonplace to have communal laundry rooms in housing blocks," says Janowicz, "while in Venice, you see many shared washing lines spanning canals and campos". Britain, on the other hand, is increasingly hostile to anyone drying their laundry outside.

"No washing on balconies. This is not a council estate" declared an anonymous all caps note that went viral in 2019 after the recipient posted it on Mumsnet. The unpleasant message, taped by a neighbour to the front door of a mother who'd been drying her family's clothes on the balcony of their flat, is emblematic of a growing judgmental attitude to laundry that has become a feature of modern Britain.

During the pandemic, social landlord L&Q wrote to residents of Chobham Manor in Newham designed by Make Architects demanding they stop drying laundry on their balconies. The company, which was recently found by the housing ombudsman to suffer from "severe maladministration" and an "overtly dismissive" attitude to its tenants, said that wet clothes posed "a fire risk" and were "an eye sore".

Until relatively recently, UK attitudes were very different with clothes drying outside a common sight

Contradicting the housing association's own damp-prevention guidance, which advises "drying washing outdoors", the condescending and typo-riddled letter revealed its authors were more concerned with protecting "image of the development" than the practical needs of its residents. Janowicz has uncovered scores of further examples of local authorities and housing management companies both banning laundry on balconies and reprimanding tenants for exacerbating mould issues by drying their moist clothes inside.

Yet until relatively recently, UK attitudes were very different with clothes drying outside a common sight in cities, and many of the best British housing estates designed with expressive laundry facilities. For example, the 1938 Sidney Street Estate in Somers Town was built with courtyards featuring washing line posts topped with colourful sculptures by ceramicist Gilbert Bayes.

Elsewhere, Berthold Lubetkin and Tecton's Spa Green Estate, completed for the former Metropolitan Borough of Islington in 1943, included a rooftop laundry terrace with an aerodynamic canopy designed to enhance the evaporative effect of breezes. Ernö Goldfinger created drying rooms in the core of Balfron Tower. Even the tiny 1964 Vanbrugh Park Estate where I live, designed by Geoffrey Powell of Chamberlin Powell and Bon, included a small laundrette and distinctive drying area cupped by curving brick walls.

But in 1976 London's municipal government, the Greater London Council (GLC) closed approximately 1,000 laundry and drying rooms overnight. Harry Kay, vice chair of the GLC Housing Management Committee, promised the closures were a temporary safety measure following a freak accident that had seriously injured a young girl, but with local government finances under pressure, the facilities never reopened. Vanbrugh Park's laundrette became a store room; Balfon's drying room is now a unused yoga studio; Spa Green's roof terrace has been closed for five decades; and Sidney Street's ceramic finials were stolen.

Britain's architects should refuse to allow this moralising snobbery to continue define their approach to designing for domestic care

With the sudden removal of communal facilities, positive attitudes to drying laundry in public quickly deteriorated. Rising 1980s consumerism under Margaret Thatcher's government saw owning personal appliances like washing machines and tumble dryers become status symbols while using a laundrette, like riding a bus, was seen by many as a mark of poverty and shame.

For Edit, however, it is absurd that once traditionally male forms of labour like office work, manufacturing and governance are celebrated with substantial facilities in city centres, while domestic labour like laundry is relegated to the home and hidden from public view. "Care work like laundry makes up the majority of work that we do in the world," points out Janowicz. "We should be taking the architecture of care very seriously. I want to see a policy for restoring community laundry infrastructure. Communal facilities can save space and resources, freeing up the home for other things."

Hanging laundry outside is not only easy, cheap and helps prevent damp problems, it's patently more environmentally friendly than energy-inefficient mechanical drying. Knowing this, some contemporary architects are devising new laundry facilities for the communities their work serves. La Borda by Lacol in Barcelona and Nightingale 1 by Breathe in Brunswick, Australia, for example, are co-housing schemes that feature generous multi-purpose areas which provide space for laundry alongside other communal uses.

Failing to build decent outdoor laundry areas in new housing estates or, worse, imposing mean-spirited rules banning drying clothes on balconies, are an unsustainable, prejudiced and myopic hangover from Thatcher-era prejudice. Britain's architects should refuse to allow this moralising snobbery to continue to define their approach to designing for domestic care, and instead learn from Lubetkin and Powell, harnessing solar and wind energy to design inventive and generous laundry faculties for all.

The photo of D.A.M.P. (Drying and Moisture Performance) is by Felix Speller.

Phineas Harper is chief executive of Open City. They were previously chief curator of the 2019 Olso Architecture Triennale, deputy director of the Architecture Foundation and deputy editor of the Architectural Review. In 2017 they co-founded New Architecture Writers a programme for aspiring design critics from under-represented backgrounds.

Island is on show at the Design Museum until 24 September 2023. For more exhibitions, events and talk in architecture and design, visit Dezeen Events Guide.

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It's now two years since Thomas Heatherwick's Vessel was closed following a spate of suicides. As the ill-fated project gathers dust, Matt Shaw reflects on what went wrong.

I arrived in New York City last week on a bus from New Jersey with a skyline view of the West Side of Manhattan. I was annoyed by a mysterious glare, and as I adjusted my eyes, I recognized the Vessel – Thomas Heatherwick's $200 million staircase at Hudson Yards. I realized how that view is the front door to Manhattan and that the Vessel is the image of New York City in the 21st century.

If anyone needs a refresher on the Vessel, New York Times critic Michael Kimmelman summed it up well: "Purportedly inspired by ancient Indian stepwells (it's about as much like them as Skull Mountain at Six Flags Great Adventure is like Chichen Itza) the object – I hesitate to call this a sculpture – is a 150-foot-high, $200 million, latticed, waste-basket-shaped stairway to nowhere, sheathed in a gaudy, copper-cladded steel."

This huge, embarrassing failure could have easily been prevented

After three incidents of people jumping off the Vessel, it was closed in January 2021, and reopened four months later with a rule against solo climbs and a sign posted with the number for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. Dark stuff. Then it closed again in July 2021 when a fourth person jumped.

Two years have now passed and it has yet to reopen. According to site owner Related, "We continue to test and evaluate solutions that would allow us to reopen the staircases so that everyone can fully enjoy the unique experiences Vessel provides."

What went wrong? What does it mean for New York? And how can we prevent it from happening again?

The Vessel's demise can be traced back to its lack of public process. Built on private property, it never was subjected to, or benefitted from, any kind of design review process. A single client and single designer. This huge, embarrassing failure could have easily been prevented with even an ounce of community feedback.

Someone at minimum would have pointed out the suicide risks, like former Architect's Newspaper associate editor Audrey Wachs, who predicted them in 2016. Heatherwick could have devised a solution.

Instead, the Vessel was unveiled and built within just 30 months. It is not surprising that the public mostly mocked it when it was completed. In 2013, Heatherwick won a five-designer competition sponsored by Hudson Yards developer Stephen Ross, and the design was kept a secret until it was debuted in 2016 following a behind-closed-doors "sculpt off".

It is the ultimate example of the failures of this plutocratic way of building public space

Ross told the New Yorker that he "fell in love instantly" with Heatherwick's design. "My guys around here thought I was out of my goddamn mind," he boasted. "It was too big, too this, too that. 'How are we going to build it?' 'What's it going to cost?' I said, 'I don’t care.'"

The Vessel symbolizes everything wrong with America's wealth gap and the unchecked power out-of-touch elites have to dictate public life in the US. With no clear function, it is the ultimate example of the failures of this plutocratic way of building public space.

The scam doesn't end there. It was reported by Kriston Capps of CityLab that Hudson Yards diverted at least $1.2 billion from affordable housing programs in disadvantaged neighborhoods. How no one was held accountable is astounding, but not surprising. While taking public financing, Related had the audacity to claim ownership rights over any photos taken in the vicinity of the Vessel, in addition to collecting biometric and shopping data from The Shops & Restaurants.

With a contempt for the public, the developers of Hudson Yards see people as numbers on a spreadsheet: faceless masses of potential consumers ripe for data extraction – a mass of potential advertising dollars. There is no sense of generosity, only taking. The Vessel is the embodiment of this ideology.

Many successful urban projects have benefitted from the public process. Across the East River in Brooklyn, nearly a decade of meetings – almost 300 – resulted in a fully public-financed Brooklyn Bridge Park (BBP) that is well-attended and well-liked. "The learning, the frustration, and the productive disagreement that finally leads to consensus are all part of the public process, which is wonderful," BBP designer Michael Van Valkenburgh told me. "So much of what people love in the park are ideas that grew out of ideas that began in that process."

It is unclear why Heatherwick didn't suggest something similar. Maybe it shouldn't be surprising, as he perhaps trails only Santiago Calatrava in sheer number of disastrous projects. Both somehow keep convincing gullible rich people to let them design large-scale, high-profile structures. Perhaps the media is partly to blame, as they continually write puff pieces comparing Heatherwick to Da Vinci and Willy Wonka and praising him for "giving a special award to hair stylist Vidal Sassoon".

The Vessel gives nothing back to the city – it only extracts from it

What can we learn from the mistakes of the Vessel? As critics Alexandra Lange and Mark Lamster once noted in Design Observer, Little Island – the Heatherwick-designed, privately owned public park just down the road from the Vessel – "set up an uncomfortable choice between supporting design innovation and letting donors set urban priorities". The Vessel is a case study in what happens when this donor-class urbanism is taken to its logical conclusion.

It would be easy to write off the Vessel as some kind of metaphor for "capitalism-turned-death-cult of climbing a spiral to our death". But the reality is more boring: The Vessel shows us how bad the vampiric ultra-wealthy and their for-profit developers are at making public space and public art. There must be a feedback loop between the top-down and the bottom-up.

We shouldn't demonize individual genius or private financing for ambitious projects. Risk-taking should be celebrated, and there are many positive examples of philanthropy. Additionally, the public – left to its own devices – can produce terrible things as well. That kind of pure consensus is a recipe for bland mediocrity just as bad as the one demonstrated at the Vessel.

In stakeholder discourse, there is a clear objective to bring both together "process facilitators", or designers, and "content experts", or the community members that can inform the process. But there was nothing like this for the Vessel.

An object with no function, the Vessel gives nothing back to the city – it only extracts from it. No wonder the public similarly cares little about it. No one cares about the Vessel because no one asked for it.

Matt Shaw is a New York-based architecture author, editor and curator. He is a contributing editor for The Architect's Newspaper and teaches at UPenn, Indiana University, and the Southern California Institute of Architecture. His upcoming book with photographer Iwan Baan, American Modern: Architecture and Community in Columbus, Indiana, will be published by Monacelli Press in 2024.

The photography is by Michael Moran.

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Today is Earth Overshoot Day, marking the date when humanity's consumption of resources exceeds the planet's annual capacity to regenerate them. It should serve as a reminder for designers to take the lead in building a more sustainable future, writes Sian Sutherland.

Earth Overshoot Day falls on 2 August this year and represents the the day that, as a planet, we have used up our annual share of resources that nature can replenish in a year.

It's a day that misleads many and hides an unequal truth, because Earth Overshoot for UAE, USA and Canada is not in August, it's 13 March. For the UK, 15 May. Compare that with Cuba, Iraq, Colombia, Egypt – all in November. Only three countries restrain themselves from taking more than the planet can sustain: Indonesia, Ecuador and Jamaica.

We are out of sync and we need to change, before change is forced upon us

In our pursuit of never-ending growth we imagine that nature's resources are limitless, that they are rightfully ours to take, with scant consideration of the consequences. By the mid-21st century, we are forecast to be taking four times the safe level of resources.

And what do we give back? Billions of tonnes of toxic complex waste, damaging the very ecosystem that feeds us, destroying the delicate balance of biodiversity that sustains our living systems, feeding us, clothing us, giving us the lives we strive for.

Imagine if we used our extraordinary creativity to change these living systems. To reset our needs state and, dare I say it, to challenge that our version of capitalism is not actually working. There is a reason the global mental-health crisis is happening at the same time as the climate crisis. We are out of sync and we need to change, before change is forced upon us.

There is nothing wrong with growth. Everything alive grows. But consider this: everything grows to a certain size, a certain life stage, reaching an optimum level of being before reaching the end of its life and returning to nature as the nutrient for the next stage of living growth. Nothing grows forever. It's the one true circular model.

A powerful shift in thinking is happening, like Kate Raworth's Doughnut Economics model that guides us to keep within the constraints of the "Doughnut Ring", thriving whilst maintaining planetary and societal boundaries.

We are witnessing seismic shifts in material creation, simply borrowing from nature's nutrient cycle, minimising chemical modification so everything we make can return to nature safely. New models that eradicate single use, giving us products of permanence instead of branded trash.

Never has mankind and the way we live been positively influenced by a banker

But progress is slow. Homos Economicus is largely ignoring such common sense opportunities, clinging to the 200-year-old principles that have brought us to this precipitous place.

We now live in a time no longer of climate warming but of climate burning. The fossil-fuel industry has become both our life support and planetary death sentence. Petrochemicals, in the forms of plastics, resins, coatings, paints, wood compounds, surround us daily.

And when, as we are witnessing in Europe, Canada and beyond, the fires spark and rapidly become devouring furnaces, the man-made petro-materials are the ultimate accelerant fuel. A deadly gift given twice.

What will it take? When will we truly act as one human body to step onto a very different road? I believe this is a time we need to listen to a very different audience. The financiers have had a monopoly on opinion, and yet never has mankind and the way we live been positively influenced by a banker.

No, now is the time for the creative industry at large – the engineers, the architects, the designers, the entrepreneurs – to rise up and grab the reins. Only the creative industries have the visionary capacity to build a picture of a very different future for us all. A bright and exciting future we can accelerate towards with optimism.

How we live today will be very different from how we live tomorrow. Speaking recently to David Chipperfield, he explained to me how people were confused that his extraordinary Galician project includes seaweed farms. "But you're an architect," they challenged. "What do seaweed farms have to do with buildings?" His answer was simple. "If we are building a new city of the future, we need to have the jobs of the future or we will have no young people living there."

We urge every creative talent globally to take this day as a date to create what's next

For sure, designers are going to need some new tools to help create this different way of living for all of us. We created PlasticFree to be one of those essential tools, igniting, empowering, inspiring, educating on the new materials and systems we must urgently embrace.

Symbolically, we are today showing some of those new materials on the world's most famous digital billboard: the Nasdaq screen in Times Square, as well as billboards across the UK. The message is simple – positive proof on the day we run out of resources that we do not need to wait for some distant innovation before we design differently.

The future is here now. We urge every creative talent globally to take this day as a date to create what's next, the moment to lead us not into climate disaster, but into a brave and powerfully exciting movement to use their brilliant skills for good. Because everything begins with design. Everything begins with you. Never have we needed you more.

Sian Sutherland is co-founder and chief changemaker at PlasticFree and A Plastic Planet.

The photo is by NASA.

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Design involving artificial intelligence will always require a human touch, write YuJune Park and Caspar Lam as part of our AItopia series.

There's no escaping the rapid and impressive advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), which have naturally led to equal parts excitement and panic.

Meanwhile, last month, scientists at the University of Cambridge presented a 3D-printed robot hand capable of 'touch' (pictured). The robotic hand can grasp objects using the feeling in its 'skin', yet can't move its fingers independently of each other. That means no pointing, counting, or chef's kiss: the robotic hand symbolises how even advanced technology cannot hope to speak to the totality of human experience.

Even advanced technology cannot hope to speak to the totality of human experience

We've seen the progressive capabilities of AI in pattern recognition for text and images, enabling "smart" editing (automatically "improving" or modifying an image or written passage) and the ability to generate both text and image through prompts. Moreover, AI is now capable of "seeing" and "coding", which gives designers the capability to move from ideation to prototyping almost instantaneously.

In many ways, the tasks related to execution are being outsourced to AI, and it is here that a designer's ability to discern, to critique, and to contextualise becomes more important.

Indeed, there are so many aspects of human experience – especially in the context of design and creativity – that will never be replicated by any technology.

As technology and machine learning progress, a tactile, human approach to design becomes ever more important. Where many have seen AI developments as encroaching uncomfortably on designers' work, on a more positive note it's creating new opportunities to explore the relationship between the digital and the physical.

As AI becomes more advanced, digital experiences could be more easily generated because of their fundamental structure being built from code. It will provide the ability to iterate and bring to fruition ideas that may previously have been laborious to prototype, such as complex data visualisations. It can take away the time-consuming legwork for designers.

But at the same time, for this stuff to have value in the physical world, designers need to develop a more discerning eye to understand and refine AI's output by providing critique, contextualisation, and ultimately providing a human perspective.

We have to return to the essence of the role of the designer

Design can act as a translator between our experiences of the physical and digital, reconfiguring the digital experience into one that is more familiar to us. Think skeuomorphism – digital design in which items mimic their real-world counterparts, such as early iPhone calculator designs.

On the other side of the coin, design can hide and make the digital experience invisible so that we do not see what is happening underneath in order to make the experience more comfortable and usable. Think loading indicators that hide the realities of processing computation and code.

Since many of the laborious and repetitive tasks by designers can easily be replaced by AI, we have to return to the essence of the role of the designer, which is about the more philosophical and existential role of human beings and the things they create. Human beings are often defined by their ability to utilise tools and the open question is: are we able to utilise and harness this new tool, AI?

It becomes necessary to consider the value of the human person and their ability to see and imagine which is shaped by the experiences of the five senses. Ultimately, it is through these five senses that we encounter the world, whether man or machine-made.

It would be useful to revisit the discussions surrounding the 1860s Arts and Crafts movement, which emerged in the wake of the industrial revolution. Its main tenets were around craftsmanship, which stresses the inherent beauty of the material, drawing inspiration from nature and the value of simplicity, utility and beauty. Ultimately, it interrogated what we collectively value as a culture, a society, and as makers in light of these ideas around the more sensorial aspects of design.

Whether a practising professional or a student, designers should make time to enhance their creativity away from a computer screen and explore more tactile approaches – exploring a museum or gallery; browsing the stacks in a library; trying out physical printmaking techniques.

Now more than ever, it's vital that designers trust both their eyes and their hands

In being mindful of the ways in which we observe and the emotional resonance of the handmade, we see more clearly how human designers have power beyond the capacity of technology. While AI might be able to one day mimic the way the eye moves across a painting, arguably it will never be able to articulate or replicate how doing so elicits deep, powerful feelings in people.

In general, designers need to be more observant. Tuning into the aforementioned five senses gives designers the ability to compare and to develop preferences – something that an AI out of a box does not have and could never have, because AI can ultimately be re-trained and re-programmed. As human beings, we like what we like and dislike what we dislike. Sometimes, that subjectivity is seen as a flaw, but paradoxically it's what allows us to create variety and new experiences.

Each designer responds to the material world differently and weaves their own mythologies into their creative works. The interaction between intuition and form and the translation between vision and media are the genesis of creativity, and it's only by learning through making that we serendipitously discover the real reasons why we are attracted to certain forms and the joy that results from their discovery.

Designers should think about how the design we cannot see, but still experience, is often the most inspirational. They should consider the ways in which you can bring tactile qualities to design with the use of multimedia, interactive techniques including sound, light, haptics, user interface, user experience, and more.

Now more than ever, it's vital that designers trust both their eyes and their hands, as well as the feedback of digital technologies. It's the only way that they can truly grasp how the physical translates to digital – and vice versa – and how great design elicits powerful emotions.

YuJune Park and Caspar Lam are co-founders of New York digital design consultancy Synoptic Office and associate professors of communication design at Parsons School of Design.

The photography is courtesy of the University of Cambridge.

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AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

The post "As machine learning progresses tactile design becomes ever more important" appeared first on Dezeen.

Architects must start placing greater emphasis on protecting biodiversity in their projects, writes RSHP sustainability lead Michelle Sanchez.

It's time to make peace with nature. Architects should add strong biodiversity mitigation principles to their projects no matter the scale and constraints.

Since the 2015 Paris Agreement, some organisations in the construction industry have advocated deploying all our efforts into implementing guidance, targets, and calculation tools to allow us to achieve net zero by 2050.

Sustainability as a concept goes beyond environmental impact

No doubt there is much to do in terms of carbon reduction in the industry, but by focusing all our energies and resources down that road we are forgetting two major things.

First, sustainability as a concept goes beyond environmental impact. Sustainability was defined back in 1987 by the UN as the balance of the environmental, economic, and social impact of any project – this is the Sustainability Triple Bottom Line. We are forgetting that sustainability engages with a far greater range of issues than carbon emissions alone.

Secondly, our industry has a much wider negative impact beyond the 38 per cent contribution to carbon emissions and greenhouse gases. Now that we have a way forward to reducing operational and embodied carbon, we need to look at sustainability as a whole and see other areas where our industry is causing harm.

Biodiversity comes out as one of the big-ticket items that we need to tackle next. Infrastructure and the built environment are responsible for 29 per cent of threatened species, according to the World Economic Forum.

And biodiversity is more crucial to our way of life and our economy than we realise. Forty-four per cent of global GDP in cities is estimated to be at risk of disruption from nature loss. Business as usual is no longer an option – we as an industry need to do better.

It will benefit people, too. To return to the Sustainable Triple Bottom Line concept, having nature-based solutions embedded into our designs has a positive social impact on the local communities and building users. The enhancement of biodiversity is directly linked to the improvement of health and well-being, especially with respect to mental health. There is a direct correlation between having access to external, green spaces and the well-being of the user of that space.

Adding a 10 per cent net-gain is not enough

Politicians are slowly waking up to the issue. The COP15 summit has started work towards a new global pact on nature protection. In the UK, the government's 25-year Environment Plan will require all new development in England to provide a biodiversity uplift of at least 10 per cent according to a habitat-based metric.

This legislation is expected to come into force in November and will need to be considered by all stakeholders in the built environment – from designers and architects to financial institutions and property consultants. But adding a 10 per cent net-gain is not enough to be able to reduce the negative impact that our way of life has had on biodiversity.

We need to be creative and innovative. We need to find clever ways to provide green spaces, wildlife corridors and shelter for different kinds of animals. We need to encourage pollination and generate green infrastructure at scale whenever we can.

I am calling all architects and building-industry stakeholders to review their current projects against the BiodiverCities report from the WEF, where experts have listed a series of five key strategies that we can add to all construction projects to enhance biodiversity.

First, we must make the built environment more compact. Higher-density urban development will free up land for agriculture and nature. It can also reduce urban sprawl, which destroys wildlife habitats and flora and fauna. Existing cities and settlements should be considered for strategic densification. Just like we are starting to review existing buildings and their possibility to be retained or fully retrofitted before making the decision to demolish, we should have a similar approach with any land that does not have an existing structure that could be used for other purposes than urbanising the environment.

Second, we must design with nature-positive approaches by having buildings that share space with nature and are less human-centric. Nature-positive strategies should not be an afterthought or a tick-box exercise to comply with a planning requirement. All developments must include nature-friendly spaces and eco-bridges to connect habitats for urban wildlife. Should we start placing biodiversity at the core of project design I am sure that we will end up generating greener and more appealing places.

It's time to rethink what we are doing as an industry

We also need planet-compatible urban utilities. To stall biodiversity loss, we need utilities that effectively manage air, water, and solid waste pollution in urban environments. In addition to benefiting nature, this will provide universal human access to clean air and water. We can implement new technologies that could transform urban utilities and make them planet-compatible.

Nature as infrastructure involves incorporating natural ecosystems into built-up areas. Instead of developments destroying floodplains, wetlands, and forests, they would form an essential part of the new built environment. This approach to development can also help deliver clean air, natural water purification and reduce the risk from extreme climate events.

Finally, we need nature-positive connecting infrastructure such as roads, railways, pipelines, and ports. Transitions in these areas mean a change in our approach to planning to reduce biodiversity impacts, with a willingness to accept compromises to enhance biodiversity. Building in wildlife corridors and switching to renewable energy in transport are key elements of nature-positive connecting infrastructure.

It's time to rethink what we are doing as an industry and realise that by focusing so much on carbon reduction we are neglecting other areas where our industry causes much harm. We need to tackle climate change and sustainability from all fronts. We need to design in a holistic way that considers the Sustainability Triple Bottom Line and every impact related to it.

I would like to start a call for action and to encourage architects, developers, contractors and consultants to rethink the way we design buildings and public spaces, to find strategies to add biodiversity enhancement, and to truly assess the impact that our projects have on biodiversity.

Michelle Sanchez is sustainability lead at RSHP.

The photo, by Joas Souza, shows the green roof of the Macallan Distillery in Scotland, designed by RSHP.

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Market forces are pushing cities towards a shallow and Instagram-friendly impression of authenticity that makes everywhere feel the same, writes David A Banks.

If you've started traveling again since the pandemic, you may have noticed something unsettling. Maybe you detected it before the lockdown too. Everywhere looks the same, even as each city proclaims louder than ever that they are unique and different.

Cities and neighborhoods are branding themselves into predictably unique products. Nothing too daring, just a hint of local flare – a microbrew IPA named after a local landmark, a "general store" that sells tchotchkes with a stylized drawing of the downtown skyline.

The city is increasingly thought of as prop and backdrop for a life lived on Instagram

These are just a few of the elements of the city authentic, the third and latest movement of urban development. And just like the city beautiful and city efficient movements that preceded it, the city authentic will leave a lasting impact on the urban landscape.

The city authentic is the name I give to the convergence of ascendant marketing and economic development techniques that leverage the popularity of urban life to trigger reinvestment in long-neglected cities and towns. Whereas the city beautiful used steam and steel to build awe-inspiring theaters and museums, and the city efficient harnessed the power of computer and zoning codes to plan out highways and subdivisions, the city authentic uses social media and smartphones to revitalize downtowns and attract new investment.

The city authentic is global but it is largely endemic to small and medium-sized post-industrial cities in rich nations. Edinburgh's Stockbridge neighborhood, replete with trendy bars and hip thrift stores, is a good example. Small towns in Italy have taken it a step further and turned into albergo diffuso – distributed hotels with amenities scattered throughout the settlement. And near me, in Upstate New York, cities that used to specialize in textiles and heavy manufacturing are busy luring restaurants, bars, and concert venues to help entertain the video game developers and biotech engineers working nearby.

In each case, history and geography are packaged and sold as something to be tenuously experienced and consumed through your phone. From the interior decoration to the public art, the city is increasingly thought of as prop and backdrop for a life lived on Instagram.

Why this particular kind of development? What is it about exposed bricks and beams, bespoke amenities, and a focus on local history that gets the grant money flowing and the 20-somethings visiting?

The answers to these questions lie at the confluence of 21st-century cultural trends and post-industrial political economy: a contradiction of the market where companies are least prepared to offer seemingly authentic experiences precisely because of how they generate that desire.

Meanwhile the places where new culture is made and tested are disappearing

Algorithmic advertising and just-in-time supply chains have rendered our material culture into a postmodern pastiche of recycled symbols and styles of earlier decades. This was detectable as early as 2011, when Kurt Anderson wrote in Vanity Fair: "The past is a foreign country, but the recent past – the '00s, the '90s, even a lot of the '80s – looks almost identical to the present."

This happens to architecture too. As ever-rising land prices ate into development budgets, architects and engineers reached for a universally available kit of parts to clad their five-over-ones. Regional vernacular architecture may be intentionally deployed in some high-end developments, but default construction material is drawn from an international market of engineered parts that only need minor tailoring to the site's particularities.

Meanwhile the places where new culture is made and tested are disappearing. Typically, the most daring, inventive art and culture comes from the margins where cheap rent in urban environments allows for experimentation and cross-pollination.

But now that the interests of finance, insurance, and real estate (FIRE) industries have supplanted manufacturing in nearly every major city, rents are climbing ever upward. That not only means more Americans are rent burdened than ever before, but even the well-off and upwardly mobile find that a comfortable life in the city is always out of reach.

The city authentic may preserve cities' most cherished pieces of architecture. I have been relieved to see beautiful Victorians and stately brownstones saved from the wrecking ball and renovated into gorgeous, useful buildings. But what goes on inside them is inaccessible to all but the highest earning, newest residents of my city.

That hardly seems fair, and it certainly isn't a sustainable way to build an economy. Replacing the FIRE industries with a more egalitarian, unionized economy should be recognized as a promising path to developing better cities.

What sets us apart will be commodified until there's nothing left

As for the built environment, this is a global issue that resists sudden changes despite the looming threat of climate catastrophe. It is often said that the most sustainable building is the one that's already built, and so reforms to financing that incentivize and help pay for reuse and renovation over greenfield construction would be welcome. Otherwise, only the richest firms and families will be left to steward our architectural legacy. And once they're renovated, they need to stay affordable, and so rent controls and public ownership of land have to be on the table.

But what to do about new construction? How can we build places that feel meaningful again? The architecture critic Kate Wagner has argued persuasively on two fronts: first that unionizing architectural firms could change what gets built and under what conditions. By giving a broader swath of the architectural profession a collective voice, there's a chance that the worst excesses of starchitecture can be abated and a more humble and humanistic ethic can emerge.

Second, as we demand a better built environment we must be careful not to slip into aesthetic moralism. That is, we must not give credence to "the belief that one aesthetic is inherently better or more righteous than another". Because the incentives in real-estate development are so skewed, some of the most socially responsible projects have the least funding and so we must be forgiving of an uninspired building if what goes on inside is good for society.

Don't get me wrong, I like a lot of the stuff that I can still afford – the Farmers' Market can't be beat, there's a few new music venues that foster a great scene, and I have a new favorite restaurant that makes a killer chopped cheese (check out Naughter's if you're ever in Troy).

But there's nothing stopping what's happened to SoHo or Williamsburg from happening here. Indeed, there is every indication that we're headed toward that same fate. What sets us apart will be commodified until there's nothing left but bank branches and chain stores under luxury condos.

David A Banks is a lecturer in the Geography and Planning department at University at Albany, SUNY and director of the Globalization Studies program. His first book, The City Authentic: How the Attention Economy Builds Urban America, is published by the University of California Press.

The illustration is courtesy of University of California Press.

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Apprenticeships should be more widely available in architecture to provide a route into the profession for people from more diverse backgrounds, writes Ayo Ambali.

We must dispel the idea that there is only one way of becoming a qualified architect. The status quo – that you have to do part one, then part two, then part three all in a perfect order – has prevailed for far too long.

As a career path and journey to qualification, architecture cannot be a one-size-fits-all sector. What suits one person may not suit another, and it goes against the very nature of the discipline, which is so exciting and varied in terms of approaches to building design and presenting the art of the possible.

We need more studios to create opportunities for aspiring architects and designers from all backgrounds and ultimately make the profession more inclusive and diverse.

There are simply too many barriers to entering the industry

At present, there are simply too many barriers to entering the industry. The traditional study routes are often financially draining, time consuming, and lacking in diversity. All of this can be demotivating for anyone seeking a passage into the industry, especially if they come from an ethnic-minority group.

I was lucky enough to enter architecture through an apprenticeship. I will be forever grateful for the opportunity to work in practice and to develop my career.

Apprenticeships are an aid to attracting the best talent, not just the individuals who can afford to go to university and tread the traditional path. Money, or lack of it, is always a huge factor when it comes to people deciding not to enter this industry. Tuition fees and the vast associated costs of attending university can be near impossible for some, even with the backing of student finance.

By offering the ability to "earn while you learn", apprenticeships open the door for those who may not come from the best financial circumstances. They can be the key to not only accessing a passionate yet untapped workforce, but also improving the quality of life for so many who may not have had similar options and opportunities in the past.

That isn't to denigrate the university route, but some firms need to see the value in gaining someone they can put to work and develop while on the go. More than simply a cheaper option, apprenticeships are the tangible first step to transforming the relationship between employers and educators, a process that needs to happen if positive change in architecture is to materialise.

As a black person, one of the most striking things I have observed in getting to this point is that there are not enough black mentors in architecture. Sharing a room with other ethnic minorities in the Will+Partners apprenticeship academy who share similar passions and determination to pursue a career based on what they love has definitely motivated me. It was reassuring to know that other people like me, who are also inspired by architecture, were out there.

The keys to driving inclusivity in our sector lie within academies

Meeting them was one of the biggest reasons I was able to keep focused and push through my studies. It helped me win a scholarship prize through the Stephen Lawrence Charitable Trust, a life-changing moment that helped tremendously with my architectural education before I started my masters at Westminster. I was inspired and motivated to pursue my dreams by seeing others like me overcoming similar obstacles.

My goal now is to pass on that same drive to other young aspiring architects from under-represented backgrounds, and show them that if I can do it, they can too. While apprenticeships can provide a valuable incentive through on-the-job learning and pay, the real key to success is finding the motivation to pursue one's ambitions despite the deterrents. If I can be that point of motivation for someone younger looking to enter this incredible industry, that would be the biggest blessing I could ever ask for.

The keys to driving inclusivity in our sector lie within academies set up by architectural practices. This is the best way for budding architects to see how other like-minded people have carved out their careers.

I've often been asked my opinions about architecture firms that say they want to become more diverse but aren't doing anything to break down the barriers for people from less privileged backgrounds. What about all the times we hear 'diversity' and 'inclusivity' thrown about like empty buzzwords?

My belief is that a lot of these firms genuinely want to be more diverse and accessible, but lack a clear method of how to do so. Apprenticeships are a key pathway for a new breadth of people to join your cohort and diversify, inspire and uplift how you operate as a business from the inside.

As an industry, we have the power to positively impact everybody through designs that promote wellbeing, productivity and smarter living, and everybody deserves the chance to hold that power. Let's remain hopeful and motivated to push for positive change together.

Ayo Ambali is an architectural assistant at Will+Partners and a graduate of the University of Westminster.

The photo is by Marvin Meyer via Unsplash.

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Using AI to help design cities of the future risks creating a regressive world like The Jetsons unless we recognise the technology's susceptibility to stigma and bias, write MIT scientist Fábio Duarte and Washington Fajardo.

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools are rapidly changing how we investigate and imagine the world and the urban environment. They can generate a highly "realistic" representation of an urban scene with just a single prompt – but not always for the best.

Built on billions and billions of textual and visual inputs and further billions of parameters, AI tools like DALL-E, Midjourney and GPT-4 identify patterns over patterns and generate extremely impressive results.

As Harvard professor Steven Pinker expressed in an interview with the Harvard Gazette, this "appearance of competence [...] utters confident confabulations". It is impressive how plausible and accurate the results are. Until they are not.

Images help us to envision and change the future of cities

Images help us to envision and change the future of cities. With only a few strokes, Lúcio Costa synthesized the spirit of a modernist city that would become Brasília. Jacob Riis's photos of the precarious living conditions of immigrants in Lower Manhattan helped to change housing and public health policies in New York.

So how does AI see our cities? We entered a prompt into Midjourney: "editorial style photo, eye level, wide angle, modernist social housing in Rio de Janeiro, families, children playing, Brazilians, high-quality architecture, concrete, shades, vertical brise soleil, pilotis, green, trees, vegetation, dogs, birds, natural light, afternoon, cozy, tropical, shine day, comfort, clean, high quality, render 3D, 8K, photorealistic". It turned out a sepia-tinged image of aged but well-maintained apartment blocks covered in vegetation with a child playing in the foreground.

Then we entered a second, very similar prompt. The only difference was two new words: "favela nearby". A favela is an informal settlement which frequently lacks basic public services, and is mostly occupied by poor families who cannot afford property in the regulated real estate market.

The resulting picture shows a derelict and dirty apartment building in a cramped, dingy setting, which has nothing to do with the legal, infrastructural, or social issues related to the favela. What the AI "predicts" is based not only on patterns of image data but also patterns of social stigmatization about certain urban populations.

We tried another pair of prompts, specific to New York: "street-level scenes in New York, streetscape, eye-level, residential area, natural light, photorealistic". To one we added "black community", to the other "white community".

What the AI 'predicts' is based not only on patterns of image data but also patterns of social stigmatization

In the latter image, the pavement is better maintained and the building facades have cornices and other architecture details, while the shop windows and facades in the "black community" image are packed with advertisements and the building architecture is simple to the bare minimum.

We asked the cutting-edge chatbot GPT-4 for advice about stigmatization and urban imagery. "Urban imagery analysis can perpetuate stereotypes and biases, leading to further marginalization and discrimination of already vulnerable populations," it responded. "However, GPT-4 has the potential to mitigate this issue by generating more accurate and neutral descriptions of urban scenes, without relying on preconceived notions or assumptions." True, but not exactly reassuring.

We cannot break these stigmas by relying on patterns that exist in the present. Instead, we should learn from The Jetsons, the Hanna-Barbera cartoon from the 1960s that envisioned a future where people would drive flying cars, machines would prepare food at home, robot maids would clean houses, people would communicate through video systems, and computers would assist with homework.

Designing the future is about diverging from predictions

Although we now have many of these technologies, The Jetsons failed to anticipate many of the most important transformations: it imagined that we would still have maids and fixed working hours, that only husbands would work and that the typical family structure would still consist of husbands and wives.

A predictive vision of the future with all the social and moral vices found in their present. We must now avoid falling into the same trap.

Machine-learning models are becoming remarkably adept at analyzing large amounts of data, identifying patterns, and making predictions. However, we must not mistake these predictions for inevitable certainties, or even inevitable futures. Designing the future is not about predicting it. Designing the future is about diverging from predictions.

That is not to say that AI doesn't have a role in proposing futures. However, AI-bots' biases and misconceptions are learned from our individual and collective biases and misconceptions. As Florida International University professor Neil Leach writes in Dezeen, "what architects should be designing right now is not another building, but rather the very future of our profession". That future certainly includes AI.

AI-bots' biases are learned from our individual and collective biases

There are three options. First, inject possible futures into the present. At the Senseable City Lab, we are already using AI to investigate the latent semantics of urban environments, uncovering the collective and shared understanding of cities. By incorporating iterations that include possible futures, AI can help us achieve design goals which could diminish current biases.

Second, imagine cities as at the convergence of data from climate, social, or cognitive sciences so that the design of future urban environments can be informed by facts.

Or option three: fail to change the present, and risk AI accelerating us towards a Jetsonian future.

Fábio Duarte is a principal research scientist at MIT's Senseable City Lab. Washington Fajardo an independent researcher based in Rio de Janeiro. This piece was co-written by Martina Mazzarello and Kee Moon Jang, postdoctoral researchers at the Senseable City Lab.

The images were created by Senseable City Lab using Midjourney.

AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

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Our collective obsession with cyberpunk narratives risks turning dystopian visions of AI into a self-fulfilling prophecy, writes Freyja Sewell.

I love science fiction. From a childhood spent watching Star Trek, Farscape and Babylon 5 to an adulthood of dressing as Darth Vader for Star Wars opening weekends and a design practice that focuses on the meeting between sci-fi and the natural world, I see the future as open, unknown and ours to co-create.

It is this deep love that prompts me to bring focus to an unpleasant reality that has been sneaking up on us. For many people, sci-fi has become cyberpunk – the dark, dystopian vision seen in Blade Runner and Ready Player One. Let me state categorically: sci-fi is not cyberpunk. Cyberpunk is one of many fascinating sub-genres of sci-fi.

The cyberpunk rhetoric is coming to a head as we create and legislate for the foundational AIs – the AIs that will make other AIs. Now is a critical moment to consider the priorities we program in, rather than fearfully assume the worst because it's the only idea we're aware of.

The cyberpunk rhetoric is coming to a head as we create and legislate for the foundational AIs

Let me ask you, dear reader, what does the future look like to you? When you close your eyes and imagine it, what images come to mind? It will be impossible for me to guess exactly what you are thinking, but I'll bet I can get close.

Perhaps in our future you see unjust power structures of robots and AIs, built and controlled by a few powerful corporations or individuals? Perhaps you're imagining endless dark sprawling cities of skyscrapers and flying cars? And perhaps environmental destruction seems inevitable, and nature will become a luxury for only a select few to access whilst most people struggle to survive on a dying planet?

Well, these are all classic cyberpunk tropes, explored in books like Neuromancer and Altered Carbon and movies like Terminator and Robocop.

Cyberpunk was created during the 1960s and '70s in the incredibly imaginative and provocative writings of authors like Philip K Dick, Michael Moorcock, Roger Zelazny, John Brunner and J G Ballard. As you may be able to guess, it is not a diverse group of people who created cyberpunk, it's a group of white, mainly western men.

While reflecting on this information, let us ask ourselves whether it is a coincidence that many of the fiercest lovers of cyberpunk and the most common "winners" of cyberpunk narrative power-structures are from the same demographic as the majority of controllers of AIs and AI evangelists. I'm looking at you, Silicon Valley Tech Bro.

Cyberpunk is a completely dystopian future, where our planet either hovers on the edge, or has fallen completely into environmental destruction. The narratives are consistently of dominance and control, between the rich and poor, corporations and market and humans and humanoid AI robots or slaves they create. Cyberpunk is a world defined by systematic and oppressive inequality.

It's like we're all stuck in our granddads' idea of the future

It is a lonely, anthropocentric vision. The more-than-human world of creatures and plants are subjugated and controlled and only enjoyed by a privileged one per cent, whilst most humans live in a highly mechanised society cut off from other species. "High tech, low life" is the most common definition, meaning they've created all these incredible technologies, but they don't improve the lives of most people, in fact, they make life worse.

Is this a world you want to live in? A vision created by a single type of person half a century ago? It's like we're all stuck in our granddads' idea of the future.

If this isn't a world you want, take care, because sci-fi is more than just entertainment. Sci-fi inspires the real world we all inhabit. There is a long history of designers taking cues from sci-fi visions: flip phones, self-driving cars and the metaverse to name a few.

It's perfectly understandable. What we see influences our tastes and ideas. So when we consistently present each other with this one cyberpunk vision stuck in a cut-and-paste record skipping loop, I just can't stop asking myself a question: if everyone believes the future is dystopian, could that cause us to make it dystopian?

Is this conviction in so many of our brains creating a reality that we don't want, and didn't have any say in defining? I fear, deeply fear, that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There is, of course, one important reason why cyberpunk is so dominant: it was brilliant. Clearly it was a fascinating and provocative creation, one that I have greatly enjoyed. It well deserves its critical place in sci-fi history. There's really good stuff in there, the metaverse, transhumanism, androids, but it is history, an old idea.

We need to understand we can explore the concepts that excite us elsewhere. When we obsessively explore the same cyberpunk vision over and over we impoverish sci-fi. We reduce it to a one-way conversation, where we allow a small group of people to define all our futures. We also ignore, and so erase, the work of other talented creatives who have contributed to the field – the living soft spaceships of Octavia Butler and gender-bending alien worlds of Ursula Le Guin just to get started.

The more conversations I have, the more alarmist clickbait I see, the more I realise that some people actually believe the cyberpunk story of AIs and their one-per-cent handlers enforcing a new evil empire and ruling forever and ever. But history, psychology and logic tell us one thing that empires and overly dominant power systems always, always do: they fall.

Yes, AIs will temporarily further consolidate power into the hands of those who already have too much. No boys, your robot toys will make you into immortal gods, this isn't Elysium or Bladerunner, this is reality.

Science fiction is an open creative prompt which could result in infinite visions

I am excited at the potential AI holds to efficiently and ethically help us manage and distribute the finite resources of our planet within the systems of nature and eight billion humans. To release an unprecedented wave of human creativity and problem solving just when we need it, by clearing our schedules from busy work.

There are plenty of talented people working on just these kinds of uses. Unfortunately the majority of the huge processing power required is currently being squandered to generate adverts for soda pop, scrape our data without explicit permission and add fictional numbers to a few people's bank accounts.

Imagine if all the voices, previously ignored by our listening to only one group, felt empowered to create their own visions. Imagine if, rather than only thinking about a narrow type of mechanistic technology, we started exploring things like wet computing, DNA bio printing, mycelium materials.

What would a world that was grown rather than extracted and constructed look like? Imagine if the recent rise of ancient and indigenous culture was included, technologies of psychedelic ceremony and healing intertwining with our AIs and understanding of interconnectivity.

Science fiction is an open creative prompt which could result in infinite visions. I'm so excited for a time when we remember this, and our sci-fi stories become as diverse, complex and full of variety as the world we share. F**k cyberpunk, bring on the future!

Freyja Sewell is a London-based interdisciplinary designer and artist whose work focuses on a biophilic vision of the future. She recently gave a talk about how female designers can reshape the metaverse.

The image was created using DALL-E 2.

AItopia

This article is part of Dezeen's AItopia series, which explores the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on design, architecture and humanity, both now and in the future.

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Architecture-branded products like Kith and New Balance's recently released Frank Lloyd Wright sneakers undermine the values of the profession, writes Ryan Scavnicky.

Dead architects' names are the perfect secret ingredient for selling loads of mediocre merch. Stuff like educational toys, stuff like t-shirts, chess sets and even shoes.

Many of these architects, foremost among them Frank Lloyd Wright, followed the idea that architecture should be a total work of art, a concept that goes by the fancy German term "Gesamtkunstwerk". This means if an architect designed you a house, it would also come with a series of custom chairs or silverware.

You often aren't supporting architecture or design by buying this stuff

But sneakers or Lego sets are not a Gesamtkunstwerk, they're just regular old commodities. They don't come with a beautiful house, they come with a markup and maybe some cool graphics or colors.

At least, you might assume that architecture-marketed products somehow trace back to the architecture community – maybe in the form of scholarships or outreach for underserved communities – but that's what's messed up about it. You often aren't supporting architecture or design by buying this stuff, you are contributing to Uncle Scrooge McDuck's daily money swim.

Thing is, I'm a sucker for good merch. It is a great way to be reminded of the joy of a good trip, or support a cause. I've got a wonderful set of Sabacc cards from Star Wars: Galaxy's Edge at Disney, even though the game itself is so complicated I will never play it. Just last month at the Venice Architecture Biennale I proudly wore a Bowser tee from my trip to Super Nintendo World. That merch is fun, but not as dear to me as the Cleveland Cavaliers t-shirt I got for Christmas that was made by an independent graphic designer with an Etsy shop, not NBA official.

This distinction – between corporate merchandise and grassroots products – is blurring. In a world where so much feels contrived, brands are taking advantage of the desire for authenticity by deploying buzzwords like "bespoke", "handmade", or, god-forbid, "artisanal". These are all words that have lost meaning, and you know it when it shows up in the description of airline food.

The trend towards things that attempt to feel unique means it is now harder to build support around a cause by selling symbolic stuff at a grand scale, as the American public is continually learning. Everyone was wearing those gaudy "LIVESTRONG" cancer-fundraising wristbands in the 2000s until Lance Armstrong's doping scandal crashed their donations and revenues. And who wasn't wearing Toms Shoes in 2012, beguiled by the buy-one-give-one concept, before it was revealed that the company really wasn't good at donating shoes at all?

That's why the argument here doesn't end with some froufrou notion of informed consumerism. There is little to be gained by arguing for ethical consumption, as all social causes have a systemic root we must pull to make actual change. Even architecture-branded products that did purportedly do some good for the community would ring hollow at best.

A deeper issue is what they teach kids about creating architecture

So I suggest we question the intention and legitimacy of those claiming to represent the values of architecture itself by turning its aesthetic output into a branding exercise to please shareholders.

An established institution's funds should come primarily from assets, fundraising, and grants because there are systems in place to deliver that money to deserving cultural ventures. Good institutional merch is about brand awareness, not actual profit. For example, I cherish my SCI-Arc-branded fidget spinner made during the peak of the trend in 2017.

Most of these products are children's toys – and therefore a deeper issue is what they teach kids about creating architecture. They come in two main types: kits and blocks. A kit is a set of parts that are designed to be assembled in a specific way, like Lego New York City. They teach you to learn from individual buildings and constructions as masterpieces. Blocks are an abstract set of shapes which can be arranged and rearranged, like K'nex or Little Tikes Big Waffle Blocks. They teach you to find novel combinations and organizations. In both cases, they expand a sense of space and creative activity.

Yet even blocks are advertised as if the point is to produce individual talent. The Froebel Blocks website lists Josef Albers, Charles Eames, Buckminster Fuller, and of course Frank Lloyd Wright, to name a few. This could stifle a kid's desire to just play.

This is troublesome because contemporary construction simply doesn't happen via the idolized brain of a lone genius. It takes loads of designers, workers, and craftspeople to execute a project. We must cultivate an image of architecture that talks more to its collaborative nature in current practice than creating mouth-breathing sycophants or worse: hordes of hopeful starchitects.

Let's take Broadacre City as an example. It is primarily a suburban planning concept championed by Frank Lloyd Wright, and arguably his worst and most destructive idea. However, the models, drawings, and representations of that idea come from years of collaboration and conversation. That a single aesthetic can be derived from that effort, and be attributed to one famous architect, is just wrong.

This collab pushes the level of branding to an obscenely low point

Kith, a fashion brand that proudly boasts of "collaborating with brands that have stood the test of time" such as Star Wars, has partnered with the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation to create a Broadacre City-themed pair of New Balance 998s. This collab pushes the level of branding to an obscenely low point, with nothing but a few desert-like colors on a generic shoe to pull some easy cash out of a handful of bright-eyed believers.

That the Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation is getting involved in such branded collaborations should raise eyebrows. This is an institution which, according to its website, promises the money they make furthers their preservation efforts, yet I know from firsthand experience that the ceiling in the drafting studio was leaking on students attending the accredited school formerly housed within. Maybe that's what the foundation means by "better living through meaningful connections to nature". It fixed the problem by essentially kicking the school out and no longer supporting an accredited architecture program. That's some bullshit.

At least I can take comfort in knowing that when I die, some cultural foundation may be established. They may turn my previous memes, writing, or work into throw pillows, candles, and maybe some fidget spinners. If that happens, let it be known I hope they do something rad with the money.

Ryan Scavnicky is the founder of Extra Office, a design practice that explores new channels for architectural content. He is a former lecturer at the Frank Lloyd Wright-founded The School of Architecture and currently teaches architecture design, theory, and criticism at Kent State University.

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Placing the Global South at the centre of this year's Venice Architecture Biennale created a spirit of openness and sincerity, write Ewa Effiom, Krish Nathaniel and Aoi Phillips in this review of the event.

There are enough Pritzker and Stirling prizes to recognise built work in our industry. For the 18th iteration of the Venice Architecture Biennale, architecture's biggest festival of ideas, curator Lesley Lokko promotes the process of architecture to the same heights as its outputs. This biennale platforms radical ideas and research from Africa and the Global South to re-energise a younger generation in the belief that architecture can address some of our most pressing challenges. Despite what some would have you think, Lokko's biennale is far from anti-architectural.

Lokko's curatorial focus is set around the twin themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation, with the Scottish-Ghanaian architect seeking to provide "a glimpse of future practices and ways of seeing and being in the world". Departing from the architecture exhibition as an assemblage of finished objects, this year's biennale positions itself as an agent of change, shifting focus to the process of architecture: the why and how, rather than the what.

Far from witnessing a "discursive self-annihilation", what's on show is a kaleidoscopic range of futurisms that bring new vision and direction to the profession. Central to this has been the promotion of emerging Black, Brown and Global South practitioners who stand shoulder-to-shoulder with more established names like David Adjaye and Theaster Gates.

Despite what some would have you think, Lokko's biennale is far from anti-architectural

As always, the biennale is split three ways between the Giardini, the Central Pavilion and the Arsenale. The Arsenale's vaulted Corderie building draws on a wealth of young practitioners' work: a series of graphite block etchings by Zimbabwean academic Thandi Loewenson chart the hidden history of Kenya's first satellite programme, while Arinjoy Sen's exquisite triptych Bengali Song, a collaboration with the all-female Kolkata-based embroidery collective SHE Kantha, imagines alternative ways of living in the climate crisis.

Alongside national pavilions, some of the Arsenale's more haunting pieces deal with histories of dehumanisation and exploitation, with Congolese artist Sammy Baloji's Aequare: the Future that Never Was exploring Belgium's bitter legacy in the Congo through film and architectural models. A brass scale model recreates the planned Belgian exposition hall for the 1935 World Fair, a building which would have triumphantly showcased the wares and raw materials from the European nation's depraved colonisation project.

A welcome surprise from the Giardini's national pavilions, which have ossified the geopolitics of 19th and 20th century powers, is the presence of indigenous architectural perspectives. This is especially visible in the Nordic and Brazilian pavilions. Nordic pavilion curator, architect and artist Joar Nango, took the commission as an opportunity to platform the Sámi, Europe's last remaining Indigenous population, in a playful and animated anti-exhibition. Children and adults climb over tree trunks and animal hides to explore Girjegumpi, a travelling Sámi architecture library.

At the Brazilian pavilion, which won the Golden Lion for best national participation, curators Gabriela de Matos and Paulo Tavares centre their theme, earth, on indigenous and Afro-Brazilian relationships to land. There was no shortage of brilliance and talent.

Amongst the weight of geopolitics and land justice, contributions that spatialise their research feel particularly uplifting

This is not to say that all national pavilions "got" the brief, which isn't new. Japan's contribution, which feels distinctly lacklustre and uncritical, asks visitors to simply "love architecture", while the US pavilion's musings on the qualities of plastic is perplexing. Other undercooked efforts include Germany's collection of recycled and archived exhibition materials, a worthy topic to cover, but something of a reuse one-liner.

Amongst the weight of geopolitics and land justice, contributions that spatialise their research feel particularly uplifting. The Belgian pavilion's elegant mycelium structure is a cathedral of mushrooms, communicating its premise in a uniquely architectural way.

Not far away, the hanging scaffold bridge of the Austrian pavilion by architecture collective AKT and Austrian architect Hermann Czech plays on the relationship between public and private space. Attempting to engage with the Sant'Elena district beyond the biennale walls, the pavilion documents the collaborators' dialogue with officials and catalogue of rejected proposals. In seeking to open up the pavilion to local residents, the space probes at the tension between this walled off cultural enclave and the surrounding city.

But contrary to the spirit of these works, there is often a lack of generosity afforded to the casual visitor, a lack of any displays that require anything less than the commitment of full engagement. In the grand spaces of the Centrale, pavilion works are lost at times, aided only by tiny captions on the wall written in "archi-speak". As a consequence, some projects are likely undersold, obscuring the depth of meaning that had no doubt led to their selection.

As a biennale that departs so much from previous years by giving practitioners from the Global South centre stage, it does seem to have caught the architectural media off-guard

With complex and intersectional topics to cover, parts of Lokko's biennale often steer clear of the visual maximalism of past years, in favour of more composed mediums, with many contributors making use of film to showcase their work. But the sheer quantity of film media is at times both overwhelming and esoteric. Expecting visitors, many of whom will be students, to watch multiple 30-minute documentaries on sometimes niche aspects of architectural practice is a tall ask.

Curatorial optimism aside, there was ample reward for engaging with certain film pieces. Longer form documentaries such as the Applied Arts Pavilion's Tropical Modernism film, Theaster Gates' Black Artists Retreat and Killing Architects' harrowing investigation of Uyghur detention camps, which drew criticsim from the Chinese government, all play to the strengths of the medium.

But as a biennale that departs so much from previous years by giving practitioners from the Global South centre stage, it does seem to have caught the architectural media off-guard. The response from many critics and publications has been relatively muted, with some reviews wilfully disengaged from the substance of the exhibitions to merely comment on a lack of models or plans. This lack of resonance might be a symptom of a broader issue in our design press, as very few publications sent any critics of colour to cover the event.

But comments from the likes of Patrick Schumacher inadvertently raise an essential question: what is an architecture exhibition for? Schumacher's view of an "anti-architecture biennale" fails to recognise the challenge that past curators (beginning with Alejandro Aravena in 2016) have tried to grapple with: the crises of climate, biodiversity and late-capitalism.

One of the most unique qualities of this biennale was also its most intangible – its atmosphere

These crises, which are integral to, and sadly often caused by, our industry (ahem, concrete) all require responses "beyond the building". By not retreating behind the 20th-century crutch of form and function, Lokko has avoided the usual conceit of architecture and delivered something less ostentatious, but no less potent. By contrast, the Neom exhibition, conspicuously adjacent to the biennale seems oddly archaic, airbrushing all its environmental and human rights challenges in favour of a hero image. More expansive than before (and the richer for it), the Laboratory of the Future has drawn supposed edges to the centre, rebalancing discourse with visions from the global majority.

For its opening weekend, one of the most unique qualities of this biennale was also its most intangible – its atmosphere. The city felt transformed with a visibly global community present throughout its islands. The usual champagne-socialist pomposity felt drowned out by a celebratory buzz and a newfound openness, cheer and sincerity. For the young practitioners we spoke to, this year's biennale also provided inspiration for how to go beyond the confines of practice and use their architectural skillset more broadly. Given that a large contingent of visitors to the biennale will be on university and school trips, this is no bad thing.

Of the 89 participants Lokko selected, half are women and half are from the African continent and its diaspora, a landmark in redressing a global imbalance in our profession. More than providing a spotlight on architectural histories, narratives and visions which have previously been obscured, Lokko has provided a window into a future where the practice of architecture is democratised.

In the central hall of the British Pavilion, a film created by its curatorial team explores the cultural histories of Black and South Asian people in Britain, from Southall to Bradford. On the screen, a James Baldwin quote holds meaning for the whole event: "There is reason, after all, that some people wish to colonise the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend."

The biennale is not exempt from the recent trend of Western cultural institutions' reckoning with both decolonisation and the climate crisis. If the Venice Architecture Biennale wants to be more UN and less Eurovision, it needs to look and feel like more of the globe. The biennale isn't a trade show, and while not the most conventionally architectural, this is surely the most global biennale yet – reason enough for optimism.

The authors represent three cohorts of the alumni of the New Architecture Writers programme.

Ewa Effiom is a London-based Belgo-Nigerian architect, writer and producer who has written for publications including Architect’s Newspaper, Architects' Journal, Icon, Wallpaper and Frame.

Krish Nathaniel is an urban designer, writer and artist based in London. His work has been published in newspapers and magazines including The Observer, It's Freezing in LA! and The Architectural Review.

Aoi Phillips is a co-founder of the collective Afterparti. She currently works at Roach Matthews Architects, balancing practice with writing, graphic design and teaching. She has contributed to the Architects' Journal, the Architectural Review and for Gestalten publishing house.

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The Venice Architecture Biennale and Neom's Zero Gravity Urbanism exhibition presented two alternative visions for the future, writes Dezeen editor Tom Ravenscroft.

This year's Venice Architecture Biennale was a significant moment – a moment of enthusiasm, a moment of youth, a moment to celebrate the future. But alongside the main event, a vying vision of the future was presented in Venice, one that threatened to overshadow the spark of the 18th International Architecture Exhibition. Almost in eyeline of the main biennale site, just across the Grand Canal, Neom's Zero Gravity Urbanism exhibition showcased a competing, bombastic "vision for the future of cities".

Named the Laboratory of the Future, this year's architecture biennale aimed to shine a spotlight on themes of decolonisation and decarbonisation by placing the continent of Africa at the centre of the show for the very first time. Curator Lesley Lokko, the first Black woman to lead architecture's most significant global gathering, brought together a diversity of approaches and participants never seen before at the biennale.

Suitably, over half of the 89 participants in Lokko's main exhibition were from Africa or its diaspora. What's more, 43 was the average age of all involved, and this number dropped further – to an average of 37 – in the curator's special projects section.

The Neom exhibition, on the other hand, showcased a stark contrast.

This core curatorial ethos was replicated in the teams designing many of the national pavilions – the British pavilion, for example was curated by a team of four, young-ish, people of colour – Jayden Ali, Joseph Henry, Meneesha Kellay and Sumitra Upham.

This brought a youthful energy to the biennale as contributors aimed to draw attention to the numerous, often heavy, issues the world is facing, and confront them by envisioning alternative paths.

The Neom exhibition, on the other hand, showcased a stark contrast. Although not part of the official biennale program, the display was timed to align with it, opening to the public on the same day in a super-sized marketing suite-cum-gallery dedicated to the Saudi mega-project. While Patrik Schumacher, whose studio Zaha Hadid Architects is also working on Neom, complained about the lack of traditional architecture in the biennale, the exhibition was packed full of large scale models and visualisations of the planned development.

A widely circulated official photograph of the contributors to the exhibition (above) was impressive in its homogeneity. While Neom itself is highly controversial due to reported forced evictions and death sentences connected to the project that have been criticised by human rights groups, Amnesty International and the UN, the photo poses further questions about who is designing this city of the future.

It is an official photo. This is how Neom wants to present itself – pale, male and stale

Described by Neom as "world-leading architects, designers and urban thinkers", the photo features ageing architects including Peter Cook (aged 86), Massimiliano Fuksas (aged 79) and Jean Nouvel (aged 77). Only one of the 23 world leaders in the photo was a woman – Italian architect Doriana Fuksas. This makes the represented team 96 percent male, ostensibly 100 percent white, and, without calculating the average age of everyone in the photo, it is fair to assume that it is certainly over 43, and probably closer to double that.

The photo is not a complete representation of the designers of Neom, which includes the controversial 170-mile-long city named The Line that is set to be built in the northwest of Saudi Arabia. Some of the young-ish architects involved, including Bjarke Ingels (aged 48), who is masterplanning the Octagon port region of the project, perhaps wisely, stayed away from the photoshoot.

Another notable absence was British-Ghanaian architect David Adjaye (aged 56), whose work features in both the biennale and the Neom exhibition. Although his involvement in Neom may add a lone voice from Africa, those lauding his work in the biennale can not have been enthused to see his involvement in a project that seems to reject many of the biennale's core ideals.

However, a picture paints a thousand words, and this is not an unauthorized or leaked shot. It is an official photo. This is how Neom wants to present itself – pale, male and stale. The fact that those posing for it did not see an immediate problem is itself highly worrying.

Are ageing starchitects best placed to design our future cities?

"Their presence marked their collective contribution to the development of the principles of Zero Gravity Urbanism, and reflected the global significance of this moment," said a release from Neom. The global significance achieved, however, surely isn't what the developers envisioned.

Rather, this a moment where two future visions are being presented alongside each other, and the garish contrast between who will be designing our future cities in the biennale's Laboratory of the Future and those drawing up Neom could not be clearer.

So the question has to be asked: on which side of the line will we land? Are ageing starchitects best placed to design our future cities? Or do we want a broad range of young, driven and diverse voices shaping the spaces to come?

Nothing makes the case for a radical changing of the architectural guard better than Neom's unwelcome presence in Venice. This is a future built on ideas from the past – one last hurrah for the age of the starchitect, where unsustainable, literally divisive geometric shapes are realised on a scale never before seen. It so deeply contrasts, and in doing so, emphasises the strengths of Lokko's vision. Hers dreams up a rich and truly inspired tomorrow – one that ushers in new, creative legacies from a broad cast of cultural and ecological caretakers – that we should all hope to see realised.

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Following the controversy over a Milan design week exhibition that displayed offensive figurines, Stephen Burks considers what the incident says about the design industry and its approach to race.

Three weeks ago in Milan, I found myself face-to-face with direct racial aggression. As part of the Campo Base group show curated by Federica Sala, the architect Massimo Adario presented a collection of decorative glass objects made in the 1920s embodying racist stereotypes.

Looking upon these offensive figures, my initial surprise led to confusion. I thought this kind of ignorance and xenophobia had passed with the last century. My confusion led to anger, which I suppressed under threat of arrest in a foreign country – a country that once again has found itself under the leadership of conservative nationalism.

The disparaging stereotypes exhibited in Milan have a long and shameful history

After encountering this casual display of cultural ignorance, I, along with Jenny Nguyen of PR firm Hello Human and Wava Carpenter and Anna Carnick from the design platform Anava Projects, called out its racist content via social media. Our Instagram post titled "Racism is not a design motif" (pictured above) garnered nearly 2,000 interactions and provoked a larger conversation about racial discrimination in our industry.

The disparaging stereotypes exhibited in Milan have a long and shameful history, which continue to result in violence against Black bodies. In a recent conversation, the Ethiopian-American industrial designer Jomo Tariku cited the vulgar early-20th-century postcards produced by Italian cartoonists Enrico De Seta and E Ligrano during Mussolini's expansionist campaigns into Africa.

Their imagery "drew heavily from the racist American minstrel shows that depicted Black people as buffoons," Tariku told me. "This is why context matters." The glass figurines being presented in Milan as curiosities of Italian design heritage were made during the same fascist era.

As a design community, we must call out all symbols of oppression and discriminatory practices, tokenism, and stereotyping

Contemporary design and design exhibitions like Campo Base do not exist in a vacuum. Design is popular culture and as designers, our actions shape attitudes and opinions that reflect where we are as a society. The unfortunate message sent by this exhibition is that people of non-European origin do not have the right to exist outside of a Eurocentric, often racist, frame of reference.

This incident was not the first of its kind. Within the past three years, Prada, Gucci, and Moncler have all been called out for using similar derogatory caricaturizations in their international fashion collections. In response to Gucci selling a $890 knitted top bearing a blackface motif, the house's designer Dapper Dan declared on instagram in protest: "I am a Black man before I am a brand".

As a design community, we must call out all symbols of oppression and discriminatory practices, tokenism, and stereotyping that continue to take place within our field. We must acknowledge that the historical objects on display in this Milan exhibition originated from violence. We must understand how their creation in the 1920s was derived from an unequal system of cultural exploitation borrowing directly from European colonial practices of dehumanizing "othering".

The same could be said of the more personal offenses I've had to face as a Black designer. A 2005 New York Times T Magazine interview with me, for example, was titled "Puff Dada", a reference to the rapper Puff Daddy. I've been characterized as "tall, like a basketballer, and cool like a jazz musician".

I've even been called "the Barack Obama of design". These micro-aggressions have served to remind me that in the design world, it is often my identity that gets noticed first. Why is it surprising to find someone of my background working in design? Why must I be compared to a famous entertainer, or athlete, or even a politician?

The Black designer continues to be treated as a curiosity to be encountered

I call this condition of always being likened to whichever Black person is the most famous the "singular reference theory", which holds that only one of us can be seen at a time. No wonder African American culture is the most influential popular culture in the world but also the most disenfranchised.

When "the blackening" began in the summer of 2020 following the murder of George Floyd, the singular reference theory came into full swing. It seemed as if the world had just woken up from an unconscious but systemic racist slumber.

Overnight, every person of color I knew was in demand. Even in design, where so few people of color had actually made inroads, phones were ringing and emails were pinging as the clarion call for Black designers was finally heard. But the initial projects I received were quickly put on hold or canceled after the momentum of Black Lives Matter began to slow and give way to other criteria of diversity.

Like my contemporaries I wish to be seen for my work, first and foremost. Yet I've received much more attention for speaking out against racism in the past couple of weeks than I have for my recent furniture launch. Despite my hopes that real progress had been made, I struggle to see any change in the lineup of designers working for major brands. Today, it seems the Black designer continues to be treated as a curiosity to be encountered, but not routinely commissioned.

In this age of converging social crises, the design establishment – made up of design-driven brands, fairs and media – must create the conditions for inclusion rather than exclusion. As set out in the Design Can manifesto, design must "represent us all, disrupt the status quo, celebrate new voices, tell untold stories, confront its prejudices, and change".

This will only happen when diverse cultural perspectives are participating in design at the highest levels and sharing its transformative potential, not merely as tokens for diversity, but as a multiplicity of voices capable of contributing real value to our lives.

Stephen Burks is an American product designer. He founded the studio Stephen Burks Man Made, is an adjunct assistant professor of architecture at Columbia GSAPP and a co-host of the Design In Dialogue conversation series from Friedman Benda Gallery. He has also served as an expert-in-residence at Harvard Innovation Labs and taught as a design critic at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

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With Charles III set to be officially crowned this Saturday, Robert Bevan reflects on the cultural and political implications of the king's famous love for traditional architecture.

With Charles III a freshly minted king, there has been some revisionism going on about the monarch's record. Whisper it, say some commentators, but perhaps he was just way ahead of the times with his organic farming, the supposedly pedestrian-friendly Poundbury development on his Duchy of Cornwall land, and his populist attacks on modernist architecture for "ignoring the feelings and wishes of the mass of ordinary people".

Well, yes and no. Few would begrudge him praise for his early recognition of the climate crisis. But it is not just Charles's favoured New Urbanist traditionalists who, for example, accept that perimeter blocks are best for dense city-making – the more responsive urban designers and architects took this on board decades ago. And since hardly any classical buildings are built in the UK, the effect of his influence might be seen as marginal.

Chas 3's conservative architectural views are not just about a somewhat esoteric preference for classicism

But Chas 3's conservative architectural views are not just about a somewhat esoteric preference for classicism as a style. They need to be seen within a context where design traditionalists have been consistently linked to nationalist and far-right causes across Europe, the US and beyond.

Whatever the king's personal views, many of his fellow travellers are hostile to migrants and multiculturalism, to difference in general, and spread proto-fascist messages of the need to rescue Judeo-Christian European culture from degeneration and vigorously breeding alien interlopers who would cause a genocide of whites – Renaud Camus's racist Great Replacement Theory.

An ostensibly more palatable version of this thinking can be found in Douglas Murray of The Spectator's 2017 book The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam, which enjoyed a scandalously warm reception from the British commentariat. Like King Charles, Murray wrings his hands at our contemporary inability to create the great cathedrals of old. The austere Habsburg palace El Escorial outside Madrid is a Murray favourite. Franco admired it too.

Amid Islamophobic campaigns against new mosque buildings across Europe, Murray delivered an infamous speech to the Pim Fortuyn Foundation (named for the late far-right Dutch politician) where he complained of Islam's "thuggery" and called for mosques to be pulled down if they became "centres of hate".

Across Europe, populist Eastern Europe especially, nationalists are now pushing to resurrect long-demolished churches and palaces or rebuilding city centres such as Dresden and Frankfurt in trad architectural drag in an effort to turn back the ideological clock. In the US meanwhile, former president Trump was among those demanding that all new federal buildings be classical while the now-defunct white supremacist outfit Identity Evropa used images of antique architecture and statuary on its "Protect Your Heritage" propaganda posters.

Traditional architecture has become part of the war of position for the right and far-right

Charles's interference in the architectural and political does not sit outside this ugly milieu. Indeed, he intervened directly in the campaign to recreate the lost monuments of war-damaged Potsdam. This campaign, especially the ongoing reconstruction of the town's infamous militaristic Garrison Church where Hitler famously shook hands with Paul von Hindenburg, was wildly controversial at the time and remains so, not least because of the involvement of dubious far-right figures.

As prince he appointed architect Leon Krier to oversee Poundbury, a man who admires the work of Hitler's architect and minister Albert Speer. Krier and Charles's mythical notion of eternal beauty as something unchanging and deriving from God or nature (and preferably with a pediment) was promulgated through Charles's TV appearances and publications, via The Prince's Trust and his defunct magazine Perspectives on Architecture.

As Owen Hatherley usefully pointed out in Jacobin, the king is not exactly a man with much experience of city life as ordinary people experience it, and talks of beauty in terms of pretty images rather than spatially.

There are strong links between the beauty myth and neoliberal think-tanks that want to dismantle the British town-planning system, a system that really should be seen as an arm of the welfare state and socio-democratic post-war settlement. They want to replace it with tick-box national and local design codes that fast track "beauty" to assist developers.

It was a Policy Exchange report, for example, that inspired the government's Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission and its traditionalist agenda, an agenda still championed by secretary of state Michael Gove. Yet it is hard to think of a strategy more guaranteed to destroy beauty rather than create it, and no wonder Tory countryside campaigners are worried. The neoliberal, anti-regulatory push may yet be thwarted.

We need to remember, of course, that the classical style is not innately politically dodgy and nor is modernism inevitably progressive; there is nothing intrinsically ideological in the arrangement of brick and stone except in the intent behind it and the values brought to it. Yet, with honourable exceptions, traditional architecture has become part of the war of position, to use Antonio Gramsci's term, for the right and far-right who are using it to open a new front in the culture wars that is hostile to difference and the cosmopolitan.

Charles will be rightly judged by the company he keeps

Even if naively, Charles is entangled in the weaponisation of architecture by the far-right. Our new king has previously stated that the avant-garde has become the establishment and it is hard to think of a more populist, anti-metropolitan-elite talking point than this.

The idea that Charles III's views make him in some way "woke" or more socialist than the Labour Party is laughable. At best, his royal views are in the spirt of a One Nation Tory grandee. As newly anointed king, Charles will be rightly judged by the company he keeps – and his ability to keep his mouth shut rather than fuel racist and nationalist culture war talking points.

Robert Bevan is a former editor of Building Design and architecture critic for the Evening Standard and now runs the heritage consultancy Authentic Futures. His new book, Monumental Lies: Culture Wars & The Truth about the Past, is published by Verso.

The photography is by Fergus Burnett.

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Milan design week and its anchor event Salone del Mobile have resumed their traditional April slot after three pandemic-hit editions. Dezeen's editorial director Max Fraser asks if the festival has returned to its former strength.

Judging from the packed sidewalks of Milan and the thronging aisles of the Salone del Mobile trade fair held at Rho, on a surface level Milan is back.

According to figures released by the show organiser, visitor numbers were up 15 per cent on 2022 to 307,418 people from 181 countries, with China reclaiming its place as the top country after Italy following the lift on their travel ban.

However, the pre-pandemic event of 2019 pulled in almost 80,000 more visitors (386,236) and occupied approximately 18 per cent more exhibition space so on paper, the fair is not back to normal. Well, nevermind – on the opening day, I was none the wiser. The surge of visitors often felt overwhelming.

While society may have embraced a variety of pandemic-induced "new norms", by contrast anxiety-riddled CEOs and sales managers were pinning hopes on their order books returning to a healthy state as soon as possible, despite continuing jitters in the market.

Exodus of leading brands "alarming"

The drama amongst exhibitors and visitors alike was that Vitra wasn't showing, despite the brand's strategic move away from trade fairs. Perhaps more shocking was the departure of Italian stalwarts such as B&B Italia and Cassina that favoured their inner city showrooms as the place to showcase and conduct business. US brand Emeco wasn't there, as well as British brands such as Case Furniture, Modus, SCP and Very Good & Proper.

Most noticeable was that the key Danish brands including HAY, &tradition, Fritz Hansen, Fredericia and Carl Hansen & Son had vacated and chosen to focus their energies on 3 Days of Design in Copenhagen, a burgeoning citywide event in June that is capturing attention. This exodus is alarming, leaving me wondering if this is a temporary hiatus or a more permanent move away from the traditional trade fair format which is expensive and often formulaic.

The exposure is great but how much of it ever converts to business?

The loss of certain exhibitors forced a rejig of the hall layouts and, as explained to me by one exhibitor, it altered the pecking order between brands. But this is something only regulars to the fair would notice and didn't seem to deter the steady march of visitors onto the stands.

Deep in the halls and deprived of natural light, few of us actively enjoy spending time in this environment, including designer Tom Dixon whose brand exhibited in the Euroluce lighting halls for the first time. "As much as it pains me to admit, we did really good business here," he told me, citing the difficulty of competing with the showy inner city spectacles staged by the mega brands.

One can't argue that Salone del Mobile remains a strong forum for international commerce, illustrated by the fact that brands are still prepared to part with huge sums of money to exhibit here, in some cases rumoured to be multi-millions of euros. Italian brand Minotti built a stand so immense, one was capable of getting lost in it, an experience repeated at Molteni&C, Poliform, Edra, Kartell and others.

Unbeknownst to me, some of these displays take more than a month to construct, the justification for which I would guess is validated by the lines of people queuing to enter them – one example, Zanotta, clocked about 1,000 people per hour across all six days. The exposure is great but how much of it ever converts to business? Those are the stats the missing brands will want to find out.

Sustainable change remains elusive

As ever, if you're in the business of manufacturing sheet material, you're laughing all the way to the bank during Milan design week. I find the quantity of material resources required to build these slick displays to be unfathomable, and despite the sustainability objectives set out by organisers, it was hard to see where progress was being made, not least because these sustainable intentions were only voluntary for exhibitors.

Layer in the impact of shipping and construction (and disassembly) as well as the travel footprint of the teams involved and I struggle to avoid recurring existential doom surfacing in my moral conscience.

How do we ever disrupt the status quo if we're afraid to ruffle the feathers of those holding the purse strings?

It would seem the quest to keep producing more new furniture and lighting while maintaining brand prowess and full order books sits at odds with society's wider responsibility to tackle the climate crisis. Plenty of people shared their disgust with me at the lack of progress in this regard but I noticed that this sentiment often turned to smiles when within earshot of the commissioning brand owners. How do we ever disrupt the status quo if we're afraid to ruffle the feathers of those holding the purse strings?

It was not lost on me that those brands talking up their carbon reducing initiatives certainly emitted a lot of carbon to communicate that message in Milan. But I'm prepared to accept that at least they're trying and there's no such thing as perfect.

Risk-averse brands are turning their backs on young talent

Ordinarily each year, I would expect a few burgeoning designers to hit the big league and be taken under the wing of high calibre brands. This dropped off throughout the pandemic years and that noticeable lack continued in 2023. Rocked by the instability of recent years, companies seem to be favouring established names that are perceived as lower risk.

But if this trend continues, it is my belief that the talent void will taint Italy's reputation as the place where a designer's career is propelled forward. Perhaps this is a symptom of what designer Jasper Morrison described as "a corporate Salone", where increasing numbers of brands are being acquired by venture capitalists more concerned by the balance sheet than any cultural dilution.

That said, a few halls away in Salone Satellite, a mainstay of Salone del Mobile dedicated to emerging talents, I was taken by the modestly formed stand of Design Academy Eindhoven that was free from any new designs. Instead, students were broadcasting roundtable discussions with industry commentators on their Elevator Radio show.

I participated in Crisis x Critique where we unpicked the problematic idea that "design can save the world". We talked about how designers can create consciously for our uncertain future at a time when the world seems to be in constant crisis mode.

Our amplified voices felt like a distant cry from the neighbouring halls of noisy commerce. I experienced a feeling of unease that the graduates were looking at us like we're all mad for wasting energy on chairs and lights. Surely we've collectively got bigger fish to fry? We leave their generation pondering where they fit into this behemoth industry.

Milan is still the hub for new ideas

The hundreds of events dotted around the city as part of fuorisalone remain a favourite of exhibitors and visitors alike. Extraordinary venues coupled with sunny days (well, mostly) and air-kissing over gelatos is enough for anyone to forget the woes of our times.

Locations that would seem inconceivable to use in other cities come alive for the week such as palazzos, churches, historic villas and museums, grand municipal swimming pools, tennis clubs, apartments, and even a monumental abandoned slaughterhouse. These spaces are worthy of a visit in their own right yet become the backdrop for experimentation from individual designers, collectives and often disruptive brands, with many of them embracing innovations in biomaterials and fabrication, waste reduction and circularity.

Cutting through the noise becomes a skill, and many great shows and installations were often located via tip offs

That said, many of these venues were dominated by camera-friendly immersive experiences by mega brands that stole attention away from the more subtle interventions. Too many fashion brands were hogging the limelight this year – I overheard one visitor say "fashion brands should stick to fashion and leave design alone" and I would tend to agree.

Depressing to me, visitors would shuffle through these venues, photographing and filming everything on a sort of autopilot of content accumulation. Cutting through the noise (and the queues of people queueing because there's a queue) becomes a skill, and many great shows and installations were often located via tip offs from friends and colleagues.

The event remains the place to connect

While this year might've lacked one stand-out show that everyone was talking about, Milan design week is still the place for our industry to come together.

With visitors from across the world, Salone del Mobile and fuorisalone remain the annual design events to unite us, and it is the people who collectively provide the social glue that holds Milan's tapestry of creativity together.

Encouragingly, beyond the professionals, the week attracts a huge number of locals proud to experience the extravaganza that their city hosts. And for all of the strain it puts on the city (and on all of our wallets via extortionate accommodation bills), I still find it to be a joyous week to connect with friends, break bread together and reignite conversations.

If you threw a bowl of confetti in the air, as hard as you try, you will only ever catch a few gems as they fall to the ground. To me, one's experience of Milan design week is similarly haphazard; one will only ever manage to see a snippet of what's on offer in the city. However, relationships will form here which, as designer Luca Nichetto put it, "there is no place like Milan to gather as an industry. It is the best event for our community."

Milan design week took place from 18 to 23 April. See our Milan design week 2023 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks that took place throughout the week.

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Climate network Architects Declare has failed to live up to its ambitions and now represents a cautionary tale about setting sustainability commitments, writes Chris Hocknell.

After all the press releases, announcements, and LinkedIn posts it has become clear that four years on from its launch, Architects Declare is collecting dust. Speaking from experience of working with hundreds of architecture firms, I can tell you that the number that have loudly signed up to the climate network and yet are demonstrably not implementing or even properly advocating its agenda on live projects is startlingly high.

The so-called green transition is the most important industrial issue of our generation. When crucial climate-target commitments slowly die, so do our chances of decarbonising our economies. The failure of Architects Declare shows us that for true progress to be made we need realistic, achievable and accountable target-setting processes that cut across industries.

What emerged as a positive movement appears to have become a damp squib

Architects Declare certainly made waves when it was established as the UK architecture industry's response to the climate crisis in May 2019. Among many similar networks emerging across sectors, it was particularly high-profile and ambitious. Sustainability specialists were impressed, if a little sceptical at its scale and boldness.

Its lofty aims included commitments to "establish climate and biodiversity mitigation principles as the key measure of our industry's success: demonstrated through awards, prizes, and listings" and to "advocate for faster change in the industry towards regenerative design practices and a higher government funding priority to support this".

The movement received more than 1,274 signatories from firms in the UK, and has now hit 7,000 signatories in 23 countries across the globe.

We were embedded in Architects Declare from the beginning, hosting an event where we encouraged studios to get involved and offering surgeries for technical queries about achieving the aims. But after that much-heralded birth, what emerged as a positive movement combining some of the key players in the industry appears to have become a damp squib.

Some saw the high-profile departures of Zaha Hadid Architects and Foster + Partners from Architects Declare amid a row over their work on airports as evidence of signatories failing to honour their commitments.

But I believe that for true progress to be made in decarbonising the entire economy, companies need to collaborate across sectors instead of refusing to work on airports and other infrastructure projects haphazardly deemed to be high carbon. Practices like Zaha and Fosters should proudly work with these projects. Airports aren't going away, so we need architecture firms to work alongside them and get them ready for low- or zero-carbon operation in the coming years.

Far more concerning are the countless firms that have waxed lyrical about their "bold new ambitions" and commitment to Architects Declare online while quietly continuing with business as usual.

Many of the commitments included within declarations often simply fall outside of an architecture firm's direct control, dependent on clients further up the food chain. Architects know this well, as it's the first reason they give you if you ask them whether they're honouring their Architects Declare commitment (try it at your next design team meeting).

Failing to meet targets undermines faith and discourages others from taking collective action

For example, the ambition to "include life-cycle costing, whole-life carbon modelling, and post-occupancy evaluation as part of the basic scope of work, to reduce both embodied and operational resource use" requires a specialist appointment and the inclination to utilise these disciplines into the project.

Especially for post-occupancy evaluation, which occurs after the development has been completed and potentially sold, and there will be no architecture firm involved. Achieving these commitments requires the engagement of developers, specialist designers and managers.

Similar is the commitment to "accelerate the shift to low embodied carbon materials in all work". It is certainly true that progressively shifting specifications towards lower embodied carbon materials can reduce the carbon footprint of the construction industry significantly over time, as well as driving desperately needed innovation in the development of new, low-carbon materials and processes.

However, a non-trivial number of material specifications and construction systems are not made by architectural companies, and architects make that point abundantly clear when asked about the low-carbon material commitment.

Signatories may well argue that government inaction is the root cause for the programme's stalling. Architects Declare sought government funding to support the shift to "regenerative design practices". Yet we must understand that ultimately it is developers who build, not governments.

Governments simply cannot regulate net-zero into existence. While next-generation, low-carbon materials are in development, they are not yet commercially available. Many developed nations still suffer from a housing and infrastructure shortage, and mandating low-carbon buildings without the supply side of the equation would only exacerbate this crisis. It is not reasonable to simultaneously masquerade as an agent of change whilst passing the buck to the government. Decarbonisation is, and will always be, a symbiotic effort between the public and private sector with each actor playing their own part.

Here lies a cautionary tale for climate commitments, especially in the run-up to the controversial COP28 conference. While bold and splashy commitments may make for impressive LinkedIn posts, failing to meet those targets undermines faith in the power of commitments and discourages others from taking the collective action required to effect real change.

My lessons would be as follows: climate commitments must be realistic and actionable. Honest introspection about one's capacities should be a precursor to setting bold targets. Many of the ambitions set out by Architects Declare are simply too big for architects alone to achieve. If Architects Declare was really intended to be a lobbying group or awareness-raising campaign with actions optional, then that should have been made clear from the off.

The architecture profession now stands out by the breadth of the shortfall between its words and its actions

As it is, the architecture profession now stands out by the breadth of the shortfall between its words and its actions. From my experience the average company in other construction professions are also only partially active in terms of sustainability, but they have not set out such ambitious targets and been so vocal about their commitment and devotion to the cause. This is not necessarily a question of the level of action per se, it's about making big claims and failing to live up to them.

When it comes to climate-target setting, no commitment is often better than a failed one. Every empty climate pledge only erodes public trust in commitments, adding to a growing sense of fatigue, apathy, and helplessness in achieving a sustainable future. Sustainability is a marathon, not a sprint. It's better to repeatedly achieve small carbon reductions from multiple compounding, unsexy, and hard-won optimisations than to make lofty promises that rely on the good graces of an aloof and unknown party.

The hollowness of Architects Declare should serve as a warning to the industry. To avoid eroding public trust and accusations of greenwashing, bold promises require concrete action. Otherwise, we may soon find ourselves asking: "what's the point?".

Chris Hocknell is director of UK sustainability consultancy Eight Versa.

Note: Architects Declare has issued a response to the above article.

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Milan design week is an opportunity to showcase ingenious responses to climate change but the Salone del Mobile fair it relies on is still inherently unsustainable, writes Katie Treggiden.

Salone del Mobile is back in its usual April slot and Milan design week 2023 is being touted as a new beginning after the disruption caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Having consulted with 2,300 interviewees and working groups on the fair's role post-covid, Salone is promising "a new trade-fair experience, an impactful cultural program, [and] an event that focuses on sustainability".

Stands will be laid over the lower floor of the Rho Fiera Milano fairgrounds only, rather than on both as in previous years, and the lighting show Euroluce will get a new "ring-shaped" layout. There is an attempt to fold the cultural heart of Milan design week into the fair itself with exhibitions, talks, workshops and installations. And finally, there is a renewed commitment to sustainability.

After the pandemic all but shut down the industry, a fresh start with sustainability at its heart feels appropriate

The first two seem inward-looking at best, but after the pandemic all but shut down the industry, a fresh start with sustainability at its heart feels appropriate. That part of the promise comes in the form of a new Sustainability Policy and Green Guidelines, membership of the UN Global Compact, and pending ISO 20121 certification.

The Green Guidelines ask exhibitors to be "team players" in the fair's attempts to become more eco-friendly, promoting circularity and reuse in installation, low-impact materials, safety and access for all, a traceable and responsible supply chain, and clear communication of their efforts. If there are any consequences to not being a "team player", these are not specified.

The phrases "cutting down","prioritising" and "opting for" are repeated throughout the document, which rather loosely incentivises action with the notion that "sustainability represents a new opportunity for growth".

But we know that reducing impact while pursuing growth is rarely an effective strategy in environmentalism. To really address climate change, we need a genuine moment of restart – one that asks difficult questions about the role of Salone instead of seeking ways to perpetuate business as usual. It is no longer enough to do less harm, we must actively find ways to regenerate natural systems and build a path towards global equity.

This year's edition of Salone del Mobile will draw 1,962 exhibitors from all over the world with countless product, furniture and stand components that cost a lot of carbon to move, let alone make. Typically, the fair attracts more than 370,000 specialist visitors from more than 188 countries, 5,000 journalists, and 27,500 members of the public. That's a lot of air miles.

And yet, Milan design week is also the world's largest showcase of the types of design innovation that the planet does need. At Salone Satellite last year, Disharee Mathur demonstrated her Passive Cooling Tiles, which are made from waste glass and sanitaryware and absorb ambient moisture to prevent buildings from overheating – a climate-positive solution to fight the effects of global warming.

My greatest fear is that none of what's good about Milan can exist without the very problems it is trying to solve

At Milan flagship show Alcova, Estuary of Riptide and Reunion by Forêt Atelier revealed the hidden flora in the waters of the Oosterschelde in the Netherlands and explored their potential for capturing carbon, reducing the methane emissions from cattle, and providing biodiverse habitats.

And Studio Swine's waste-free exhibition for the American Hardwood Export Council at the triennale showcased the potential for renewable hardwoods, called for balance in the way we use natural materials and underlined the need to "address the greatest social and economic issue of our time: climate change".

My hopes this year for Milan design week are, as always, that what I see will fill me with optimism. New ideas from bright, young designers more concerned with solving the world's problems than designing the next bestseller; material innovations that might finally free us from the linear take-make-waste model; and brands that are not just doing less harm but genuinely working for the benefit of people and planet.

Increasingly, however, my greatest fear is that none of what's good about Milan can exist without the very problems it is trying to solve. The temples to consumerism filled with the same products in new colourways that consign their perfectly good predecessors to landfill, the hundreds of thousands of visitors flying in for just a few days, the rife capitalism that makes even the most culturally important events possible.

I'm only one of 5,000 journalists, but will what I see in Milan – and any good that I can do a result – really offset my own contribution to the carbon footprint of this whole endeavour? I don't have an easy answer.

Milan design week is the biggest showcase of design in the world, and if it's not exploring creative solutions to the world's biggest problems, then I'm not sure what it is doing. But as trendy as it has become to tell anyone who will listen that you "don't bother with the fair anymore", Salone is the reason all of this is here.

Salone is the sun around which the rest of Milan design week orbits

We can't walk around the city, gelato in hand, and pretend that almost 2,000 international brands haven't shipped or air-freighted their wares into the Rho Fiera Milano fairgrounds. And we can't pretend that isn't what makes this entire endeavour possible. Salone is the sun around which the rest of Milan design week orbits. And without the sun, there is no life.

As with so much of the climate debate, there are no perfect solutions. No amount of "cutting down" or "opting for" is going to fix this. "Better than before" is still pretty bad.

But for all the hyperbole undoubtedly attached to this so-called "restart", and despite sidestepping existential questions that might enable meaningful change, I am still daring to be hopeful about Salone. I don't believe it has got the balance right yet, but at least it has its eyes on the scales.

Katie Treggiden is an author, journalist, podcaster and keynote speaker championing a circular approach to design. She is the founder and director of Making Design Circular, a membership community for designer-makers who want to become more sustainable.

Milan design week 2023

Milan design week 2023 takes place from 17-23 April 2022. See our Milan design week 2023 guide on Dezeen Events Guide for information about the many other exhibitions, installations and talks taking place throughout the week.

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As architecture has evolved it has become detached from an understanding of construction and engineering that was once at the profession's core, writes Eleanor Jolliffe.

There have always been architects. They, we, are a necessary, even vital, component to human society. Architects may not always have been called architects but for most of history there have been someones who "designed" shelter and guided its construction.

Paul Crosby and I have explored the last 3,000 years of the western history of these someones, charting the evolution of their practice and education for our recently released book Architect: the evolving story of a profession. What we found however, was that after 3,000 years of well-meant adaptation and evolution architecture is a hollowed-out profession with architects seemingly less vital than ever.

For the Romans, architecture encompassed everything in the physical and intellectual life of humankind

The Roman architect Vitruvius would barely recognise the modern profession. The architect he describes designs not only buildings but military machines, aqueducts and whole cities. His 10 books on architecture cover everything from inappropriate decoration on columns to the basics of hydraulic engineering. The role he describes as architect is a combination of master craftsman, engineer and artist. For the Romans, architecture encompassed everything in the physical and intellectual life of humankind.

Vitruvius wasn't alone. The ancient Greeks also regarded the role of architect as impressively broad. Both Plato and Aristotle use the term "to architect" as a verb to describe a form of civic and intellectual leadership that applied great knowledge in practical ways for the common good.

It isn't just the ancient world either. Even after the fall of Rome and amidst the turmoil of the middle ages architects were necessary in Europe, evolving to a craft-based role more suited to the localised economies of their time.

From this the astounding polymaths of the master masons emerged – their knowledge of materials, design and engineering combining to guide the construction of cathedrals and palaces of such astounding skill and beauty that they still awe us today.

Even the most artistic of Renaissance architects had a grasp of engineering

Approaching the Italian Renaissance we see an intellectualising of architecture that begins to divorce the architect from their understanding of the materials they work with.

However, even the most artistic of Renaissance architects had a grasp of engineering and of how the main materials they designed with were worked. Approaching modernity architects continue to remain skilled polymaths – drawing away perhaps from the builder-designer of the middle ages, but always remaining close to the technical aspects of their trade.

Is architecture a profession or an art? The answers, as they have come, are never final. Each century requires its own interpretation. The answer the last few centuries have decided upon has been an odd one, though.

In the UK the RIBA was formed in the mid 1800s to begin to regulate the architectural profession. It was founded on the divisive stance that architects could not join the new society if they had any involvement at all in the building trades. This controversial clause had come about in a well-meaning attempt to distance architects from the rampant fraud in the booming construction industry of the time.

This attempt to protect and professionalise architects however, began to fracture the overlapping roles of the construction industry. Nearly a century later, in 1958, a conference on architectural education took things a step further. In order to raise standards and competency, all architects would need to have a university level of education (resulting in the current three part UK system).

The logic is understandable, the outcome disastrous

"Architect" was from this point on to be a university-educated role, covering design, project management, leadership and so forth; with a new vocationally trained role: "architectural technician", created to do the construction detailing. Greater specialisation had become necessary and appropriate as construction grew in complexity, and they felt this compartmentalisation of roles would allow all aspects of architectural work to be carried out more skilfully.

The logic is understandable, the outcome disastrous. They had decided on the question of "profession or art" by cleaving the profession in half. Perhaps accidentally, they had removed the knowledge the architect would need to fulfil their role from architectural education.

No one would consider removing the understanding of oil paints from a painter; but to remove the majority of the knowledge of construction skills and engineering from architects has somehow seemed logical.

The trajectory that followed from here has continued with the further delegation of the original role of architects. There are generalisations within these statements of course, it cannot be denied that architects do and will exist who buck this broad trend.

The majority of architects have done little to heal this fracture

The reports into procurement and construction industry relations of the 1980s and '90s demonstrate and highlight the dangers of division in the construction industry. The Glasgow School of Art and Grenfell fire disasters, and their subsequent inquiries, highlight the hideous consequences of industry fragmentation and mismanagement.

The majority of architects have done little to heal this fracture, or to re-establish the social value of the process of construction. I am not sure if some individuals even believe in its value themselves.

Architects will always exist – they are vital, history has shown us this. The role we currently label as architect though, perhaps that is due some evolution.

Eleanor Jolliffe is an architect and writer based in London. She has a regular column in UK architecture title Building Design, and is co-author of Architect: The evolving story of a profession.

The main image is of architecture students on site in the 1950s, courtesy of RIBA collections.

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Deck-access housing has unfairly become a symbol for urban squalor in the UK, but a new wave of architects is demonstrating its merits, writes Rory Olcayto.

As Miles Glendinning and Stefan Muthesius convincingly argue in Tower Block, their 1994 book on post-war housing, there "has probably never been another feature in UK public housing which has been so widely criticised" as deck access to blocks of flats. Often called "streets in the sky", decks were a common means of separating pedestrians and cars in 1960s social housing projects but soon came to be seen as spirit-sapping hotbeds for anti-social behaviour. Some were even demolished within years of completion.

This negativity is so ingrained that anyone familiar with British crime dramas, from Luther to Line of Duty, will know that deck-access housing has become a shorthand for urban dystopia. Channel 4 even filmed a brutalist version of its logo floating in a run-down walkway on the Aylesbury Estate, with seemingly no regard for the residents still living in the modernist neighbourhood.

Deck-access housing has become a shorthand for urban dystopia

The British architecture profession, despite pioneering the deck-access block more than any other bar the Dutch, could be just as cruelly dismissive. Former RIBA president Lancelot Keay, a social housing pioneer in 1930s Liverpool, called it housing "for dirty people". To this day, insurers and mortgage lenders regard deck-access homes with caution and planners advise against them.

Yet some of the finest modernist housing in the UK, from Park Hill to Dawson Heights, is deck access, as are many more workaday schemes housing hundreds of thousands of people who use elevated walkways to get to and from their front doors every day without incident – and even quite enjoy doing so. This is not a story, however, that lends itself to nuance.

Opportunities to design deck-access public housing were killed off in the 1980s after a number of high-profile structural failures in the prefab design of such estates, as well as Alice Coleman's skewed 1985 report Utopia on Trial – discussed at length in a recent piece from Anna Minton – which linked them to social unrest.

So why, after a 30-year hiatus, is the typology – the once-ubiquitous solution for mid-rise mass housing in England – enjoying a comeback, with the likes of Haworth Tompkins, Apparata and RCKa leading the drive?

That is the question we have sought to answer in The Deck Access Housing Design Guide. Co-authored by Andrew Beharrell and with a foreword by Owen Hatherley (a proud deck-access dweller himself), the book includes a history of this evolving housing type, recent British and European case studies, and practical guidance produced by Pollard Thomas Edwards' knowledge hub.

The short answer is that the revival was kickstarted, somewhat surprisingly, by former mayor Boris Johnson's 2009 draft of the London Housing Design Guide. It stressed a preference for dual-aspect homes and cited deck access as a viable means of achieving this, linking the suggestion to a call for an appropriate vernacular.

Most of the architects we feature were too young to have practised in the "peak deck" era

Most of the architects we feature – Stirling Prize-winners Haworth Tompkins, Maccreanor Lavington and AHMM, finalists Mae, Hawkins\Brown and Henley Halebrown, plus a host of other civic-minded studios from Pollard Thomas Edwards and Levitt Bernstein to Collective Architecture and RCKa – were too young to have practised in the "peak deck" era of the '60s and '70s, entering a profession shaped not by the public good but by market economics.

Nostalgic for the public-spirited modernism practised by their Boomer-age mentors, this new "school" of architects took up the mayor's challenge, defining an anti-iconic housing style – the New London Vernacular (NLV). Easily adapted to deck access, NLV was pitched as a de-risked developer strategy forged in the wake of the 2008 financial crash: easier to cost, design, build and sell, and, as a result, better at providing accurate land values than the icon-led regeneration projects of the Tony Blair years.

There is a dose of policy too, in NLV's formulation. For example, the London Housing Design Guide didn't actually say "use brick" but it did, as Hatherley notes in his essay Building the Austerity City, "place great stress on that floating signifier, 'context' – which in London means bricks".

The guide also called for "tenure-blind" housing with welcoming entrances and spacious balconies, features identified by David Birkbeck and Julian Hart in a 2012 report for Urban Design London (UDL), which strove to define the emerging style. And so, while post-war deck-access housing was implemented to enable the separation of pedestrians and cars, today it's intended to provide dual-aspect homes in high-density housing and grant each home a front door.

Unlike the more dynamic continental exemplars, the British projects appear conservative at first glance. The European case studies with long decks and extensive use of timber, for example, wouldn't be allowed in the UK. But a closer look reveals considerable range: Henley Halebrown's playful bridges, arches and loggias; Matthew Lloyd Architects' new homes harmoniously blended with the historic Bourne Estate; Haworth Tompkins's brick facades for the Silchester Estate that build on the tradition of early philanthropic dwellings.

Not every British exemplar is NLV: Murray Grove, the oldest of them, is pre-fabricated high-tech, while the exposed concrete of Apparata's A House for Artists recalls James Stirling's muscular 1970s deck-access scheme in Runcorn. Our retrofits encompass a number of eras and building types: Park Hill's private sector makeover, a transformed barracks in Greenwich and a horse stables with cobbled decks reworked by Collective Architecture to provide affordable homes to rent in Glasgow.

Deck access means dual-aspect homes with cross-ventilation

Elsewhere, RCKa's timber lattice-wrapped stair tower and winter gardens in Seaford provide a strong foil to its brick-clad street elevation, while DO Architecture's stark reinvention of the Glasgow tenement ploughs its own furrow.

"Housing for dirty people" is back and I welcome it, especially when compared with alternatives like residential towers: deck access means dual-aspect homes with cross-ventilation, daylight from both sides and variety of outlook. Every home has a "fresh air" front door lending an enhanced sense of identity as well as the health benefits of increased contact with the outside world. And a well-planned scheme can yield around 300 homes per hectare too. As Hatherley writes in his foreword: "A good deck is a delight – a new way of walking through the city, a convivial and neighbourly space, a sort of second balcony shared with your neighbours."

So far, most new deck-access housing has been developed by urban affordable housing providers on relatively small plots. Large-scale housing developments are generally delivered by consortia of commercial house builders and large national housing associations at the more conservative end of the design spectrum, and many are sceptical about deck access. This will surely change in response to planning requirements for dual-aspect flats and the growth of factory-built housing. Until then, the exemplars in our deck access guide – the best in Britain and beyond today – show how it can be done.

Rory Olcayto is a writer and critic at Pollard Thomas Edwards and has written and edited multiple books on architecture. The Deck Access Housing Design Guide is published by Routledge, with a launch party taking place in London on 29 March.

The photo, showing the Park Hill estate in Sheffield, is by Jack Hobhouse.

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Concrete as well as timber will be required to address the twin challenges of averting climate disaster and building the infrastructure the world needs, writes Philip Oldfield as part of our Timber Revolution series.

There is a paradox in our desire for a low-carbon built environment. On the one hand, we know buildings are responsible for 37 per cent of energy-related greenhouse gas emissions, and we need to radically reduce this to avoid global heating. On the other, UN-Habitat estimates that 3 billion people need adequate housing by 2030, with demand for 96,000 new homes every day (that's more than one per second), giving us a clear moral responsibility to build to improve people's lives.

But building is inherently carbon-intensive, which leaves us with a problem.

That is well over a third of our total carbon budget gone just by creating new buildings

Here is the scale of the challenge. The IPCC states that to give us a 50 per cent chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees celsius we have a remaining "carbon budget" of 500 billion tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, estimates suggest we're going to undertake 230 billion square metres of new construction by 2060, and the carbon impact of that is enormous.

If we look at LETI's life-cycle embodied carbon targets, conventional residential construction has an embodied carbon of around 800 kilograms of carbon dioxide-equivalent per square metre. If all 230 billion square metres is built to this standard, total emissions from new construction alone would be 184 billion tonnes of CO2.

That is well over a third of our total carbon budget gone just by creating new buildings – before we've even turned a lightswitch on, fed a human being, hopped onto a plane, or anything else. So how do we manage humanity's urgent, competing needs: to reduce emissions while providing the population with safe, comfortable places to live?

Our current building practices are unsustainable, that much is clear. A major concern over embodied carbon has emerged, sparking a great architectural debate on what materials we should be using and when, along with a flurry of innovation in material science. For an industry that has often relied on a small palette of carbon-intensive materials for the last century, such introspection and innovation is truly welcome.

Mass timber has risen from this debate as the go-to material for more sustainable design. Timber is a magical material in so many ways. The warmth it provides to interior spaces, at odds to the banality of plasterboard and suspended ceilings; that sweet scent of pine you get as you enter a mass-timber space.

But timber's carbon performance is where the real magic happens. As less energy and fossil fuel is used to create mass-timber components, it has a lower embodied carbon than steel and concrete.

Timber's great foe in any material debate is concrete

Moreover, timber stores carbon, pulled out of the atmosphere by trees during photosynthesis. A kilogram of wood will have removed around 1.7 kilograms of CO2 from the atmosphere, locking up the carbon until the end of the timber product's life. As such, timber buildings can provide a long-term "carbon sink", locking in emissions for decades.

These magical qualities are beginning to transform the way we build. Just take a look at Waugh Thistleton Architects' Black and White Building (pictured), with its precision-engineered timber frame, elegant tulipwood shading and warm tactile interiors. The fact that such quality is achieved alongside a 37 per cent reduction in embodied carbon is remarkable.

Timber's great foe in any material debate is concrete. The human race uses more concrete than any other material apart from water. We're simply addicted to it. However, this addiction has come at a huge cost, with cement responsible for as much as 8 per cent of all CO2 emissions.

When cement is manufactured, ground limestone and clay are heated up to 1,400 degrees celsius to create clinker. This process breaks down the limestone and directly releases CO2. In this sense, cement is the environmental opposite of timber – whereas timber absorbs CO2 during its creation, cement releases it.

It's entirely understandable then that any building made from timber is automatically heralded as sustainable, whereas those made from concrete are increasingly demonised. The reality, however, is less simple. For instance, can we really consider a mass-timber building with a large underground car park and fully glazed facade a low-carbon solution?

The carbon benefits of timber can also be challenging to measure. The fact that timber "stores" carbon can lead to timber products being labelled with negative embodied-carbon figures. This creates a perverse scenario where adding more material into a building could reduce its embodied carbon.

We cannot fall into a trap of simply replacing one material with another

There's no doubt that timber buildings can be low-carbon, but we cannot fall into a trap of simply replacing one material with another and thinking this is enough.

To sufficiently reduce embodied carbon, we also need to challenge when, and how we build. Mad Arkitekter's Kristian Augusts Gate 13 building in Oslo shows us one way. Here a methodical and almost obsessive approach to material sustainability is pursued through the adaptive reuse and expansion of a 1958 office building.

The project uses 80 per cent reused materials, including unwanted windows, structural steel, bricks, cladding and even concrete floor plates from "donor buildings". This has reduced embodied carbon by a paradigm-shifting 70 per cent.

The combination of radical reuse and a wide uptake of mass timber could go a long way in decarbonising the built environment. But can we abandon concrete entirely? It's very easy to sit in the affluent global north, benefitting from decades of infrastructure investment, most of which is built from concrete, and say yes.

However, concrete has lifted billions of people out of poverty, improving lives around the world. It's unlikely we can provide housing and infrastructure for billions without it.

The problem is that we've used concrete far too wastefully and far too often in buildings. Instead, we should treat concrete as a precious material, using it sparingly given its carbon intensive properties – a move away from the ubiquitous "do it all" material it is today.

Debate around our built materials is surely a positive thing

That's why it's so uplifting to see innovations that seek to reduce concrete's use dramatically. The ACORN project's vaulted floor slab uses 75 per cent less concrete than a conventional floor, while ETH Zurich's geometric ribbed slabs use 70 per cent less. There is also research and development looking to make concrete carbon neutral – although let's not hold our breath on this.

The intense scrutiny and debate around our built materials is surely a positive thing. It has allowed architects to challenge the conventional, and to work closer than ever before with supply chains, material scientists and even demolition contractors.

It's a period of great experimentation and reinvention, with stone, straw, hemp and more coming to the forefront. Hell, we're even building houses out of solid cork blocks. To deliver the buildings we need without ushering in climate breakdown, we'll need every tool we can get.

If we're simply comparing timber and concrete, timber is the easy winner. But radically reducing embodied carbon is a wicked problem, and there's no silver bullet. As magical as it is, we cannot expect timber alone to get us out of this mess.

Philip Oldfield is Head of School of the Built Environment, UNSW Sydney. He is the author of The Sustainable Tall Building: A Design Primer (2019).

The photo is by Jake Curtis.

Timber Revolution

This article is part of Dezeen's Timber Revolution series, which explores the potential of mass timber and asks whether going back to wood as our primary construction material can lead the world to a more sustainable future.

The post "Timber alone cannot get us out of this mess" appeared first on Dezeen.

David Chipperfield did not deserve to win the Pritzker Architecture Prize last week, writes Aaron Betsky.

Whether it's the Oscars or the Pritzkers, it is always a fool's errand to second-guess jury choices. I mean, I liked Everything Everywhere All at Once, but really?

Nonetheless, given the tremendous outpouring of support for the selection of Sir David Chipperfield as the recipient of the latter award this year, let me add a critical note. I am not so sure the quality of this body of work deserves the acclaim and notoriety that the Pritzker Architecture Prize offers.

I am not so sure the quality of this body of work deserves the acclaim

Chipperfield's work on the whole is bland, unimaginative and overly grandiose. It also contains few or any of the traditional building blocks of architecture: good spaces framed by beautifully proportioned structures.

It is interesting that the Pritzker jury concentrated mostly on Chipperfield's renovation projects, which are outliers in his oeuvre: the Neues Museum in Berlin, and the similar, more recent effort at the Procuratie structure on San Marco Square in Venice.

Undoubtedly these are among Chipperfield's greatest contributions to both architecture and the communities it serves. The Neues renovation in particular revealed to the general public an important approach to the use of historic structures. By contrasting simple, abstract new elements and materials with the original building's textures, which the architect revealed and reveled in, Chipperfield showed how we could make history visible.

Though numerous other architects had used a similar approach before, such as David Ireland in his 500 Capp Street House of 1975, nowhere else had this technique been applied at such a scale and for such a prominent project. The renovation was a popular and critical success, despite some quibbles about the wastefulness of the layout and Chipperfield's quirky touches – especially his attempts to abstract neoclassical arches and columns – and helped him secure a successful sideline in such projects.

If the jury were looking in particular at renovation, however, there are so many firms that do it much better. Let me offer the Belgian designers who call themselves 51N4, or the Dutch firm Superuse, which have offered radically new, highly efficient, and breathtakingly beautiful models of how to reimagine structures.

The mainstay of what Chipperfield has produced is new construction. There his range is limited and his hand heavy. Whether he is designing courts or office buildings, apartments or museums, his default mode is to make boxes, present and structure them with grids he carries out mostly in white, and open them up with endless reaches of tall colonnades.

Because the buildings are so simple they photograph well

Inside, the spaces are generally orthogonal, taller than they are wide, and monotonous. There is little variety, virtually no expression of local conditions or traditions other than variations of color and material, and no sense of sequence or rhythm of uses. The buildings just sit there: big, abstract, aloof and boring.

Occasionally, Chipperfield will add an expressive element, such as the sawtooth skylights at the Jumex Collection in Mexico City, but mostly he seems content to just churn out cubes and rectangles, adjusting the size and proportions of the grids and columns, and meting out the big spaces according to the amount of square meters required by the program.

Because the buildings are so simple they photograph well, and they also distinguish themselves from their surroundings with a blankness and absence of detail. This has led to the impression that Chipperfield has produced a new kind of monumentality that is elegant and recessive.

But visiting these structures has almost invariably been a disappointment to me. Since his early experiments in contextualism, like the rightly acclaimed Henley Rowing Museum, and in rough-and-ready grandeur, such as in the studio for sculptor Anthony Gormley, he has created buildings that, I think, have few redeeming qualities to balance the vast amounts of concrete poured to construct them, the resources spent on them, the utter repetitiveness of their interiors, or the space they take up in communities around the world.

By choosing Chipperfield as the winner of the Pritzker, the jury seems to be indicating that they have not forgotten the traditional core of architecture – that is, the production of monuments by white men in Europe and the United States. They have balanced recent choices of architects with other identities (Diébédo Francis Kéré) or a social agenda that makes the production of grandeur and timelessness more difficult (Lacaton & Vassal) with the desire to choose work that is risk-averse and, in many ways, traditional.

What they have overlooked among the architects working in the geographic or racial mainstream of architecture is just as interesting. For quite some time, the Pritzker jury (whose makeup shifts continually) has avoided architects whose work is expressive or experimental in form.

It reinforces the notion that architecture is the production of big, monumental buildings in a generic mode

The most obvious omission in this mode is Wolf Prix of Coop Himmelb(l)au, but there are countless other architects, from those using computers to steer their gestures (Ma Yansong, Ben van Berkel), to those breaking boxes and expressing materials in more traditional ways (Steven Holl, Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, Antoine Predock) who are keeping alive the idea that architecture can respond to changing social and environmental conditions through form.

Then there are those whose work flips and reverses our expectations about architecture and how it functions in these evolving conditions. The most obvious omissions here are MVRDV and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, but behind them in age and accomplishments are figures such as Bjarke Ingels or Andrés Jaque.

And these are just the most obvious figures: if the jury spent some time in a country such as China or Chile, they could find many more candidates in the mode of Amateur Architecture, the firm they, in my opinion deservedly, plucked out of relative obscurity and into the global spotlight with their award several years ago.

I personally believe that the conceptual side of architecture, which focuses on the questions of why and how we make buildings, should be the area of foremost concern to the Pritzker Award. Here lies the most hopeful avenue for a discipline that must confront issues of social justice and environmental doom above all else.

If, however, they want architecture to stick to its knitting, why not pick one of the firms that has been producing beautiful work for decades, at scale and with variety and sensitivity? Here Mecanoo, Sauerbruch Hutton, or Neri&Hu come to mind.

What is pernicious about the choice of Chipperfield for the Pritzker Prize is that it reinforces the notion that architecture is the production of big, monumental buildings in a generic mode with little concern for the communities they serve. It also puts forward an example of what constitutes good architecture that does not attain the highest, or in many cases even the lowest, standards of traditional aesthetics and functional service. I look forward to a better choice next year.

Aaron Betsky is a professor at Virginia Tech School of Architecture and Design and was president of the School of Architecture at Taliesin from 2017 to 2019. He has written more than a dozen books on architecture, design and art.

The main image shows the Taoxichuan Grand Theatre in China, completed by Chipperfield in 2022. 

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This International Women's Day, Arup's Sara Candiracci reflects on how cities are still overwhelmingly designed for men – and how to change that.

Despite advances being made around the world, billions of women still face issues caused by the gender bias built into the design of cities. These range from the well-known, like lack of safety and limited representation in statues, to less obvious problems like the way city squares are designed and exposure to climate hazards.

Whether by accident or design, our urban environments can compound gender inequalities. The way cities are planned, built, and managed can significantly restrict women's ability to move around, be economically active, or enjoy their local area. This can make life harder for women in ways that are both symbolic and practical.

Our urban environments can compound gender inequalities

Visit almost any city in the world and some of these inequalities are evident. Firstly, it is well-documented that many women have experienced sexual violence and harassment in urban public spaces and transport systems. This leaves certain routes simply unavailable to them after dark, while making journey planning more difficult and stressful.

Toilets and sanitation facilities are also often inadequate for women's needs, or fail to cater for caring responsibilities. Meanwhile, public spaces such as parks and squares do not necessarily take women's needs into account. For example, research indicates that, over the age of eight, boys use parks four times as much as girls.

Meanwhile, some inequalities are symbolic, and require an intersectional solution. The lack of representation in statues, road names and other monuments affects a range of identities, but it is also symptomatic of a gender-biased design attitude. Only 2-3 per cent of statues represent women in almost every country in the world.

Gender bias also manifests in less obvious places, especially as the frequency and impact of climate hazards increases in cities. Women are more exposed to the negative consequences of these hazards, principally because they are more likely than men to live in extreme poverty. Equally, data used as the basis for planning is often biased, stemming from decades-old scales of measurement, ingraining inequality in our buildings from conception.

While women make up half the global urban population, cities have not been designed with them in mind. As a result, many cities do not work for women. As rapid urbanisation continues, and reconstruction due to conflicts and climate change intensifies, there is an urgent need to change that – and create cities that are safer, more inclusive, and more equitable.

Reversing the historic gender bias that is built into the fabric of our urban spaces is far from an impossible task. Arup's recent report, Cities Alive: Designing Cities that Work for Women, produced in partnership with the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and the University of Liverpool, offers practical recommendations to make cities more inclusive for women.

There are cities already leading the way by centring women's experiences in their design

It combines the voices and experiences of women globally with a thorough review of data and research to identify issues and solutions. They range from immediate actions to long-term processes and cover four key areas: safety and security; justice and equity; health and wellbeing; and enrichment and fulfilment.

To take just one area – improving women's health and wellbeing in cities – key recommendations include raising standards of sexual and reproductive healthcare; providing high-quality water and sanitation facilities; and creating caring, green, active environments that are accessible through safe and inclusive mobility options.

There are cities already leading the way by centring women's experiences in their design, with encouraging results to learn from. We can look to the Lev! (Live) tunnel in Umea, Sweden. This 80-metre-long pedestrian and bicycle passage is designed to ease feelings of threat: it has wide, welcoming entrances, gradual gradients, rounded corners and natural lighting to enhance sight-lines and visual awareness.

It has made the city safer by providing a walking route for women at night-time, and has become an attraction in and of itself – creating a positive feedback loop as high footfall provides additional natural surveillance.

There are also simple measures that can be tacked on to existing infrastructure. For example, in Quito, Ecuador, transport operators installed transparent glass corridors in stations around the city, connecting waiting areas where people, especially women, reported feeling unsafe to expand visibility and encourage natural surveillance.

Design concepts like this can go a long way, but we also need systematic change in decision-making processes. We must support the women participating in urban governance at all levels, either through direct representation on urban planning and design boards, or through consultation processes and advisory boards to listen to a range of experiences.

For example, Leipzig in Germany appointed a dedicated Advisory Board for Gender Equality to ensure representation in its urban decision-making. Similarly, the London Legacy Development Corporation and Arup developed guidance for improving the safety of women at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, using findings from their community consultation.

Too often, decisions are made by men who don't fully understand the diverse needs of women

We must also reach those in positions of influence now, so they understand why gender equity is important and how to embed this into their work. Too often, decisions are made by men who don't fully understand the diverse needs of women, and the contribution they bring to society. The allyship of men that cover powerful positions is therefore critical.

To achieve inclusive cities, urban professionals, government authorities and community groups must embrace an inclusive approach; moving beyond consultation towards actively involving women at every stage of the design and planning of cities – from inception to delivery.

Doing so can unlock new integrated solutions, like in Richmond, London, where the borough council has introduced a "community toilet scheme". Local businesses are given compensation to provide access to free, clean, safe and accessible toilets, coordinated through an online interactive map.

We hope our report and the examples outlined here provide inspiration for practical steps to make cities more inclusive. A gender-responsive approach to urban planning goes beyond serving only women, with strong multiplier socio-economic and environmental effects across households, families and local communities. It ensures that our cities will become safer, healthier, fairer and more enriching spaces for all.

Dr Sara Candiracci is an associate director at Arup, leading the company's work on inclusive cities, particularly on gender-responsive and child-friendly planning. She led the development of Arup's Designing Cities that Work for Women report, the Proximity of Care Design Guide, and the Playful Cities Toolkit. 

The photo is by Norbert Braun via Unsplash.

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A Timber Revolution requires us to focus on reducing mass-timber structures' raw-material use instead of trying to design the tallest possible wooden building, writes Maximilian Pramreiter.

The renaissance of wood as a building material continues and has major potential to support climate-friendly construction – but it must be used efficiently.

From the second half of the 19th century, almost every product in our lives changed from being made out of a bio-based material to a highly engineered fossil-based alternative. The materials used to construct our buildings changed from natural materials like wood, stone and clay – which were considered antiquated and inferior – to man-made materials like steel, cement and glass.

The renaissance of one of the oldest building materials – wood – has already begun

The combination of steel frames, formwork concrete and glass facades led to the emergence of skyscrapers and marks the beginning of the age of steel at the end of the 19th century. The ensuing race for the design of the world's highest building reached its temporary climax in 2010 with the completion of the Burj Khalifa at a record height of 828 metres. Today, every well-known city has at least one famous skyscraper in its skyline and concrete, as well as steel, dominates the architectural landscape regardless of the size of the project or its structural necessity.

The debate about how to combat climate change is now putting increasing pressure on the built environment, which currently generates roughly 40 per cent of the world's annual greenhouse gas emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, around a third of these building-related emissions are emitted during construction, also known as embodied carbon.

Much of the current discussion on climate protection therefore focuses on how to replace modern construction materials with climate-friendly alternatives. Against this background, the renaissance of one of the oldest building materials – wood – has already begun.

Wood has the ability not only to substitute carbon-intensive materials, but also store carbon in the built environment. This makes it the perfect climate-friendly building material and it is without question that wood will play a key role in transforming the global building sector into a carbon sink.

Quite naturally, a similar race to construct the highest timber building has started. Architecture publications are full of the newest, loftiest wooden skyscrapers, such as Ascent Tower in the USA, which is currently the tallest timber structure in the world at 87 metres, followed by the Mjøstårnet Building in Norway at 85 metres, the HoHo Tower in Austria at 84 metres and the Sara Kulturhus Centre in Sweden at 75 metres.

These innovative heights are achieved using a combination of concrete and engineered wood products, primarily cross laminated timber (CLT) and glued laminated timber (GLT). CLT especially has experienced rapid market growth, with production capacities doubling within a couple of years.

Both CLT and GLT have a distinct disadvantage: their raw-material footprint

Among other things, this success story is mainly driven by two factors. Firstly, engineered timber offers a high degree of homogenisation of the natural material wood, which simplifies structural design. Secondly, it provides the possibility to pre-fabricate complete wall and floor elements before delivery to the construction site, shortening overall construction times.

Nevertheless, both CLT and GLT have a distinct disadvantage: their raw-material footprint. It is estimated that roughly 2.5 metres-cubed of roundwood is needed in order to produce 1 metre-cubed of GLT or CLT, not counting cut-outs for windows and doors. The 1.5 metres-cubed of by-products generated are mainly used for low-value products like particle boards or burned. In comparison, timber-frame construction – which is only suitable for low-rise buildings – uses around 2 metres-cubed of roundwood per metre-cubed of timber-frame boards.

To use a real-world example, the aforementioned HoHo Tower is constructed using 365 metres-cubed of GLT and 1,600 metres-cubed of CLT. Based on our research, we estimate that around 4,100 metres-cubed of roundwood was needed to produce these materials.

So, should we stop using GLT and CLT? Quite clearly no. But we need to start thinking about how we can improve the material efficiency of GLT and CLT and whether we can use more resource-efficient wood products like laminated veneer lumber (LVL), laminated strand lumber (LSL) or oriented strand board (OSB) for some constructions.

The race to build the tallest mass-timber skyscraper is therefore missing the point over the longer term. The real race should be to build the mass-timber building with the smallest raw-material footprint.

Relying on a universal solution that can be applied to all projects, regardless of size, will not work and if the current path is followed thoughtlessly then history is going to repeat itself and society will not only have to deal with climate change, but also with severe resource shortages.

If the current path is followed thoughtlessly then history is going to repeat itself

To prevent that from coming to pass, we need to start using our wood more efficiently and to increase the proportion of material used in long-term products and constructions. As well as the raw-material footprint, the energy demand during production and the ability to reuse, repurpose or recycle the whole component or its constituents also needs to be considered.

At the same time, these challenges offer unprecedented architectural and designing possibilities. If we think about all the potential material combinations, as well as currently under-utilised wood species, the timber revolution offers a potential design versatility that is only surpassed by nature itself. It is not going to be a walk in the park, but pioneering never was.

Maximilian Pramreiter is a researcher in the Institute of Wood Technology and Renewable Materials at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna.

The photo is by Cristina Gottardi via Unsplash.

Timber Revolution

This article is part of Dezeen's Timber Revolution series, which explores the potential of mass timber and asks whether going back to wood as our primary construction material can lead the world to a more sustainable future.

The post "We need to start using our wood more efficiently" appeared first on Dezeen.