Architects should finally acknowledge that the profession is no longer a guaranteed route to prosperity and unionise, writes Phineas Harper.

We've all met them: architecture graduates up to their eyeballs in debt, paying two thirds of their income in rent, and effectively earning less than minimum wage but who still identify as "middle class". Why, despite being saddled with low pay and crushing hours, do so many architects think they are more privileged than they really are?

Though privately educated nepo babies with family wealth and connections dominate many top jobs in the sector, the vast majority of people working in architecture are not rich. Most are ordinary state-school grads; many have no savings and high workloads and would quickly find themselves destitute if they were no longer able to sell their labour to make ends meet.

Whether they identify with the label or not, most architects are workers

Ultimately, whether they identify with the label or not, most architects are workers.

Despite this, trade unionism in the profession is low. In Britain a dedicated union, Section of Architectural Workers (SAW), launched in 2019, recently joining forces with Unite, while in the US architects can sign up with one of multiple unions. However, though membership grants employees access to support when facing down dodgy employers, the vast majority of architects on both sides of the Atlantic are not in unions.

Though RIBA membership costs twice as much as SAW and doesn't come with free legal help, thousands more architects opt to join the more expensive royal institute than their trade union.

"The foundation of this industry was rich men who didn't care if they were making money," Brooklyn-based architect and union organiser Andrew Daley tells me. He argues that the profession's upper-class history still affects how practitioners identify and which professional bodies they join today.

"The demographics have shifted, but many architects still don't think of themselves as workers. People say, 'We don't deserve a union, we're too educated, we're too bougie.' Those things can sometimes be true, but none of them mean that we don't deserve basic legal protection."

Individual union membership provides safeguards against bad treatment from employers but is only really useful as a form of last-ditch crisis insurance. The far more strategic way to improve working conditions in the long term is for multiple staff at a single practice to all join the same union and adopt a recognition agreement.

Architecture is lightyears behind other sectors

Recognition agreements are simple contracts committing employers to working with a union on behalf of their staff, setting out how the two organisations will collaborate and communicate. Typically they include commitments on how each party will work through key decisions together.

According to the UK's Community Trade Union, workplaces with union recognition agreements have eight per cent higher pay on average.

"Union recognition allows workers to be much more effective," says SAW coordinator Jake Arnfield. "It means you don't just have to react when things go wrong, but can negotiate proactively, improving conditions at your workplace for the future."

Well drafted, recognition agreements give managers a structured way to consult with their teams, and offer employees the chance to contribute positively to decision-making. Yet despite the benefits, architecture is lightyears behind other sectors in adopting them. Only one architecture firm in the US has taken the plunge, and in Britain there has never been a single recognition agreement between a private architecture practice and a trade union.

Some myopic managers fear that signing a recognition agreement will give their staff too much influence over the business, but this is wrong-headed. All employees have a vested interest in helping their employers to succeed, and the more staff are empowered to have a meaningful voice in decision-making, the stronger that vested interest becomes.

Progressive managers who want their businesses to succeed in the long term should understand that union recognition is not a threat to their operations, but an opportunity to build a more sustainable workplace culture.

Too many architects still suffer under ludicrously long hours, unpaid overtime and other workplace issues

While I was chief executive of Open City, at the request of the staff the charity adopted a voluntary union recognition agreement with Independent Workers of Great Britain that proved hugely beneficial. Within a year of signing, the union had helped us craft a much-improved pay policy and think through challenging ethical issues. Fiddly tasks that would have previously fallen to already-stretched managers were instead shared out more equitably – win-win!

Good employers who care about the ideas and welfare of their staff have nothing to fear from adopting a recognition agreement. In 2022 Bernheimer Architecture in New York made history by becoming the first American private sector architecture firm to voluntarily adopt a recognition agreement with its staff. The firm won positive media coverage as a result, and an instant reputation for being a good employer which is translating into new work.

Even at less enlightened practices where sceptical managers may at first refuse to voluntarily sign up to union recognition, it is relatively easy to twist their arm. In Britain, staff at any company with more than 20 employees can force their bosses to recognise a union if a majority of the team are up for it by following a simple statutory process. In the US workers only need 30 per cent to vote in favour.

Though many practices are good employers, too many architects still suffer under ludicrously long hours, unpaid overtime and other workplace issues all directly linked to the chronic lack of recognition agreements in the sector. There is no shame in admitting that an architecture degree is simply not the guaranteed route to middle-class prosperity that it once was, but as workers acting alongside colleagues, architects still have the power to improve the profession for the benefit of everyone.

The formula is simple: join a union, get a recognition agreement. Form follows fair pay!

Phineas Harper is the former chief executive of Open City. They were previously chief curator of the 2019 Oslo 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.

The photo is courtesy of UVW-SAW.

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Milan design week seemed to show that the industry has given up on reducing its planetary impact and creating products for regular people, writes Max Fraser.

If last year's Milan design week felt like a return to a version of pre-pandemic editions, this year's felt like a hyped-up mega-festival.

It's difficult to attain reliable figures for the number of individual events that took place across the city (reports range from several hundred to more than 1,000), as well as the main commercial trade event, Salone del Mobile. But whatever the actual figure is, this year the visitor experience had certainly intensified.

There were many times when I felt I had been brazenly "data-captured"

One visible sign of this was the queues. They felt particularly acute this year, presumably off the back of a surge of attendees. According to figures published by Salone del Mobile, visitor numbers increased by 17.1 per cent this year, with 361,417 people recorded through the trade fair's turnstiles.

Has Milan design week become a victim of its own popularity? I heard reports of design revellers waiting for up to three hours to enter some of the shows. Queues were often slowed by the requirement to register. One's details are now commonly harvested by brands and there were many times when I felt I had been brazenly "data-captured".

Once inside, one often slots into a human conveyor formation, shuffling hurriedly through the venue surrounded by people who seem principally concerned with capturing the whole thing on their phones.

Meanwhile, organisers boasted to me about their queues and record attendance, seemingly judging success by popularity, without much concern for how much of people's time they were cannibalising.

But for punters, time is precious. For many, it's expensive too; international visitors must increasingly spend a fortune on travel and accommodation, an annual problem that seems to only be getting worse.

On the positive side, many Milanese inhabitants also attend. It would seem this globally important design extravaganza provides one moment in the year for mass inspiration coupled with an outpouring of Milanese glam.

Design is increasingly moving away from providing solutions for the needs of regular people

In its purest form, Milan design week has always acted as an annual window into humanity's desire for creative expression. It is the primary event for ideas exchange and that is one of the lures that keeps us returning year-on-year, with the added bonus of seeing old friends and making new ones.

However, my concern this year (and in recent editions) is that design is increasingly moving away from providing solutions for the needs of regular people and is instead churning out a disproportionate amount of decorative objects for the wealthy.

My discomfort comes with how willingly the rest of us have fallen into the role of bot-like communicators, inadvertently giving our precious time, attention and data to what often turn out to be superfluous marketing displays.

I attended one showcase by a tech brand and rapidly had the impression that I had been dragged into an internal strategy presentation; I felt nauseous observing the excessive use of virgin materials to build an expensive display of corporate hyperbole. If only the millions spent there could have been spent on something that mattered – housing the men sleeping rough in the tunnel around the corner would be a valiant place to start.

At a different venue, overwhelmed by the enormous use of sheet material to build the temporary walls in the space, I asked about the display's afterlife. "It'll mostly be scrapped due to the way it's assembled," said a senior staff member. Oh well, never mind, this is someone else's problem, right?

I had to reassure myself that this approach was surely outnumbered by the week's many displays of material innovation and sustainable thinking.

For all the talk about sustainability in design, this year the topic felt woefully missing or, at best, tokenistic

For example, industrial manufacturer Hydro's small-but-perfectly-formed 100R exhibition of extruded aluminium furniture demonstrated the possibility of working with 100 per cent post-consumer scrap; design studio Niceworkshop developed furniture made from redundant formwork previously used for skyscraper construction; and at Salone del Mobile, furniture brand Knoll revived its stand design from last year.

But for all the talk about sustainability in design, this year the topic felt woefully missing or, at best, tokenistic. It still feels like we're tinkering at the edges when it comes to reducing our planetary impact. My inner mood throughout the week flicked between deep feelings of pessimism to moments of optimism when sharing these concerns with kindred spirits.

In case anyone has forgotten, humanity is careering towards an uncertain future with climate breakdown and inequality regularly surfacing around us. Perhaps Milan design week provides us with a few days of respite from this existential dark cloud, its energy an opportunity for us to collectively recharge.

But do we really want to be remembered for creating more nice stuff for wealthy people to occasionally use?

As a high-end manufacturer once admitted to me: "I am in the business of catching the crumbs that the rich brush off the table." Is the part of the design industry that is so prevalent in Milan mostly in service to the one per cent and, if so, are we OK with that?

Do we need to make more enormous sofas that are too big (and expensive) for most people's homes? Could we bear not to launch new stuff on this annual treadmill?

It's worth acknowledging that we're currently all complicit – including the marketing, PR and media worlds – for stirring up the hype. For the most part, many of us operate in the capitalist trap of needing to continually feed the machine. In many instances, sizeable investment has been put into energy-intensive materials and manufacturing processes, from which it is costly to rapidly pivot.

The tempering of Milan-fever is overdue

And it's important to recognise that many businesses are valiantly working to provide employment and preserve crafts that have been perfected by talented individuals. Invariably, the results don't come cheap.

For as long as there is a market for this, and during this period of economic uncertainty, why consciously bite off the hand that feeds us? Therein lies the predicament.

As the biggest and most influential global gathering of its kind, Milan design week always provides a barometer of the health of the design industry. You might think it's unfair to point the finger at Milan and I'm sorry if I sound like a party-pooper but, at this urgent juncture in history, the majority of the industry is still focused on the wrong prize.

For all of the spectacle of the week, the fun cocktail parties and industry-wide comradery, the tempering of Milan-fever is overdue and the urgency for meaningful change is now. We need to stop acting as if someone else is going to make the changes to production and consumption that we so desperately need to enact.

The photography is by Kuan Chi Hau.

Max Fraser is editorial director of Dezeen.

Milan design week took place from 15 to 21 April 2024. See Dezeen Events Guide for an up-to-date list of architecture and design events taking place around the world.

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Design thinking should be substituted for "food thinking" to enable humans to create properly holistic systems that no longer cause ecological chaos, writes Sophie Lovell.

Design has become unfit for purpose. Humanity shares one small planet with a large number of other lifeforms and catastrophes happen to everything and everyone on it. From the destruction of ecosystems and climate to the chronic effects of the exploitation of people and resources, design has been complicit in creating the state the world now finds itself in.

The majority of what passes for design doesn't so much solve problems as cause a whole load of new ones. Can it be that the universal model of design thinking, so embraced by capitalism, is not the right approach at this watershed moment in the planet's history?

What if there was another, more relational way of approaching the design process?

Taking a problem-solving approach, as designers are mostly taught to do, implies something is "wrong" and that the designer's job is to fix or improve it. The difficulty with looking at the world like this is it puts the designer and the user on a closed-loop binary seesaw. It is not contextually aware.

A human-centred, iterative approach like design thinking heavily echoes the traditional Western science model: empirical observation, systematic experimentation and the formulation of hypotheses and theories based on evidence. It's all about conquering a "problem" through a mindset of experimentation and rational discussion until the "right" answer is arrived at.

What if there was another, more relational way of approaching the design process? One that is based not on things or problems but on building and maintaining healthy relationships instead? A non-binary approach that is adaptive, and embraces context, equity and equality, allowing for even contradictory interests of myriad stakeholders. One that is less causal, more entangled.

Spatial practitioners radically rethinking "architecture after architecture" have been working in this direction for some time. Spatial Agency, for example, is founded by architects who have shifted their focus from "matter of fact" to "matter of concern" and "making stuff to making policy". And the collaborative design studio Forty Five Degrees considers the built environment "across multiple scales, analysing its physical, social, and economic entanglements".

Both practices, however, predominantly use the (human) built environment and (human) social interactions and spatial use and occupation as the framework for their endeavours. In other words, they still, as architects, tend to put communities of humans and their structures at the centre of their focus. Human-centred approaches to design, no matter how inspiring, still carry vestigial baggage from the mindset of (human) dominion over every other life form (resource) – and look where that has got us.

What about everything else – the vast realm of the "non-human", on which humans are utterly dependent and connected to, from climate and soils to flora and fauna, minerals, macro- and microorganisms? Where does one find a more planet-conscious design approach that is human-related but with a stronger emphasis on the non-human and flexible enough to incorporate the enormous complexity such a holistic perspective would involve?

The diversity of non-extractive agriculture and food-related practices should make ideal learning tools for designers

The answer could be surprisingly simple: food. "Food is everything," says chef José Andrés, founder of World Central Kitchen. "Food is national security. Food is economy. It is employment, energy, history… If we approached many of today's issues understanding this importance, we'd be making much better decisions."

Food production and agriculture are the oldest industries known to humankind. They are filled with knowledge stemming from millennia of experimentation, adaptation and cohabitation with all the world's constantly changing ecologies.

I'm not talking about the majority of extractive industrial agriculture and food production monocultures that belong to the "them and us" system of dominion and ownership. I'm talking about the many thousands of other, niche-specific forms of agriculture and food production that are not – the practices and practitioners that modern industrial industries have mostly ignored when they weren't trying to exploit or eradicate them.

Chef Andrés is right: the perspectives and values of all human cultures are deeply embedded in their food production practices, which means this embodied knowledge is per se contextual and holistic. Therefore, the diversity of non-extractive agriculture and food-related practices (from seasonal dishes to fermentation, crop diversity, community/ecology-appropriate planting and so on) should make ideal learning tools for designers addressing the many failing and dated human-generated systems that need to change.

Please note: I am not advocating yet more cultural exploitation of indigenous knowledge here, I am advocating respect for non-material value, learning how to ask better questions and really, properly, listen.

Back in 1962, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring tried to remind the world that all living things are part of a web of life and if you touch, change or move anything you should do so with care, not just for the obvious consequences but for the unforeseen ones as well. The world may have heard, but it did not listen.

Designers should not be working within manufacturing environments

In 2015, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing argued in her book The Mushroom at the End of the World that "staying alive – for every species – requires livable collaborations. Collaboration means working across difference, which leads to contamination. Without collaborations, we all die."

Is the world going to continue making the same mistake? We need to disentangle ourselves from notions of "progress" and fully embrace existing entanglements with nature, with other living beings, with cultural wisdom, our bodies, our technologies and our planet.

Investigative, cross-disciplinary practice in design is, of course, not new, but the increasing focus on food systems has been noticeable. Another set of spatial practitioners, Cooking Sections, for example, have been working in an investigative manner on food-related topics for the past decade as part of their ongoing Climavore project.

This is a research platform working with marine biologists, botanists, farmers, chefs, herders, fisherfolk, anthropologists, geneticists and many others to ask "how to eat as humans change climates." The Cooking Sections collaborative completely gets that asking better, more inclusive questions and striving for an extensively collaborative practice is the way forward. And it is no accident that they chose food systems to work with.

Agricultural and food-production practices are an ideal place to start rethinking how we design because they are the result of people working in partnership with their contexts. To establish environments where enough nourishing food can be produced regeneratively, people need to work within their ecosystems.

Likewise, designers should not be working within manufacturing environments but within multidisciplinary and multi-representative knowledge environments.

Humans need to stop treating the planet as a for-profit industrial farm owned by a handful of people

In a bleak recent lecture, the highly respected Dark Matter Labs architect Indy Johar pointed out that the extent of land under food production is now so vast that Earth is now essentially "a global farm with a small zoo for wild animals." The ramifications are terrifying when put into the context (as he goes on to do) of the current dramatically accelerated level of planetary destruction.

Humans need to stop treating the planet as a for-profit industrial farm owned by a handful of people – not at some speculative time in the future, but right now.

Stepping away from the toxic system in which design has hitherto been complicit by embracing food thinking not only facilitates an accessible, inclusive path for designers to help nurture thriving ecologies by building and maintaining healthy relationships, it is essential to survival.

Sophie Lovell is a design and architecture writer and the co-founder of The Common Table, a platform for food thinking and systemic change, together with her daughter Orlando Lovell. She has written and edited several books on design and architecture, including David Thulstrup: A Sense of Place and Dieter Rams: As Little Design as Possible (Phaidon).

The photo is by Nick Fewings via Unsplash.

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We need to end our use of plastics for the sake of the planet and human's health, writes the director of Earth Day's end plastic initiatives Aidan Charron.

Plastics have become ubiquitous in our lives, they are everywhere and unavoidable but it hasn't always been like that. They are relatively new materials and while they do have some benefits, they are overused! Why the hell do we need to wrap a peeled orange in a clamshell container? Who does that benefit?

This has to stop. We need to end plastics for the sake of human and planetary health. This is why we are demanding a 60 per reduction in the production of all plastics by 2040.

Production of plastic is twice as high as 20 years ago with no sign of slowing down

Like smoking and lead in the 20th century, we know so little about the over 15,000 chemicals that can make up plastics and regard them as harmless. Of those chemicals, over 4,200 are hazardous, while only 980 are regulated and the vast majority of the other 11,000 or so are just not studied or regulated at all.

Our use of plastics is still increasing, with production of plastic twice as high as 20 years ago with no sign of slowing down. If we continue at our current trends, plastic use will triple from current levels in less than 40 years.

We don't have the technology or ability to handle the waste we currently have, so what will happen in 2060 if we triple production? Pictures of choked waterways, ocean-floor littering and trashed public areas will be the norm – not to mention the massive health implications of plastic and its additive chemicals.

Currently, plastics contribute $250 billion to healthcare costs annually in the United States alone. This stems from the diseases caused by the many chemicals such as PFAS, bisphenols and phthalates, which provide the unique characteristics of each plastic.

It is clear we need to ween ourselves of plastic

Last year the Earthday.org team set out to analyze and produce a report that goes over the main health issues that arise from plastic use, specifically those we are seeing in infants and children. The information we found was staggering. Microplastics are bioaccumulating in our major organs, being found in human placentas, detected in breast milk.

It's scary enough that they are able to penetrate all of these places. But even worse, they are actively contributing to general and childhood cancer rates the world over, with phthalate exposure linked to a 20 per cent increase in childhood cancer.

I could dive into more, including how infertility rates are increasing because of decreased sperm quality, while plastics production has risen. But if what I've highlighted so far doesn't frighten you a bit, I don't know what will (maybe the mention of the decrease in male genitalia size).

It is clear we need to ween ourselves of plastic. So, why a 60 per cent reduction by 2040 and is this possible? In my opinion, it is not only possible but the bare minimum we need the world to do.

At present 50 per cent of all plastic is single-use and the majority of that is single-use packaging that is not recyclable. Globally only nine per cent of all plastics are recycled. In the United States, it's only five per cent.

We need a ban on single-use plastics, our throwaway culture is new and needs to go away.

We need a ban on single-use plastics, our throwaway culture is new and needs to go away. Reuse, reuse, reuse should be how we think about most things, especially plastic. If we eliminate single-use plastic, that's 50 per cent of our reduction right there, with only 10 per cent to go.

Looking backwards can be a great way to move forward and the call for reusability makes sense. We have existing materials that pose less of a risk to human health compared to plastics. Glass can be used again and again and even when it breaks, it can be melted down and remolded. Glass! One of the oldest human-manufactured products, let's utilize it like we were for millennia.

Technology is great, don't get me wrong. And some great products have come out as alternatives to plastic such as mycelium composite alternatives to certain packaging. But what happens if we technology our way into something worse than plastic? Something that has worse health effects than current plastics and their added chemicals.

They had their hay day and it's time to move beyond them

Let's move back to utilizing longer-lasting materials. Wood is regenerative, let's start using in places where plastic has taken over like in the building of furniture. Stop making our clothes from synthetic materials, that flake off microplastics into the air and waterways.  Organic cotton, hemp, and wool grow back unlike plastic.

Once we start going for quality over quantity, we can start reducing our plastic production. We can get to a 60 per cent reduction in plastic. Two years ago, over 75 per cent of Americans wanted to see a reduction in single-use plastic, I suspect that number has grown with the attention plastics are getting in our media and with the advent of the Global Plastic Treaty.

It's time to call on our leaders to support the phase-down of plastics, they had their hay day, and it's time to move beyond them. Let's shoot for a 60 per cent reduction of production by 2040. We can do it, we just need those in power to listen to the vast majority of people who support it!

Aidan Charron is director of end plastic initiatives at Earthday.org.

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Architects should learn from Italo Rota's desire to constantly learn and evolve his view of architecture, Carlo Ratti writes following the Italian architect's death last week.

What is architecture? Every designer has his own definition. For Le Corbusier, it was "the skilful, rigorous, and magnificent play of volumes under light", while for Gio Ponti it was a quest: "sharp, essential, pure – pure as crystal". For Italo Rota it was something much broader: "architecture is a projection of the mind."

He used to repeat this sentence often, in a wry, mischievous tone, while stopping by our office in Torino, Italy. I believe that his all-encompassing definition of architecture is needed today more than ever.

The breadth of his interests was boundless and the focus of his projects diverse

Italo, who passed away last week aged 70, had a five-decade-long career marked by whirlwind mutations. While still a student he became a close collaborator of the great Italian neo-rationalist Franco Albini, then contributed to Vittorio Gregotti's 1970s megastructures, such as the Università della Calabria. Later, he became the lead architect for several neo-liberty projects by Gae Aulenti, co-signing with her one of the key museums of the time – the renovation of the famed Gare d'Orsay in Paris.

After opening his own office, he delivered some of the most interesting cultural buildings of the past decades – from the Cour Carré of the Musée du Louvre in Paris to the Museo del Novecento in Milan. Yet, if I had to attach a label to his oeuvre, I would say that he ultimately espoused only one movement: a continuous avant-garde.

The breadth of his interests was boundless and the focus of his projects diverse: only someone like Italo could create a spectacular augmented reality installation at the Milan Triennale for Samsung, and a handful of years later produce an Etruscan-style tomb for theatre director Luca Ronconi – the latter designed with Margherita Palli, stage-designer extraordinaire and Italo's lifelong companion.

His character is better grasped by dredging up voracious medieval sages like Ramon Llull than by comparing him to eclectic impresarios like Philip Johnson or Charles Moore.

Architecture as a "projection of the mind" also translated into his celebrated collecting passion – a magnificent Wunderkammer in his Milanese home today contains one of the most extensive collections of the architectural avant-gardes of the 20th century – and into a multiplicity of cultural interests, including artificial intelligence. He would constantly strive to explore digital advances firsthand – organising symposia and engaging with leading academics from all over the world.

His research was always embedded in academia, reflected in his role as director of the New Academy of Fine Arts (NABA) in Milan. His relationship with the revolving generations of students was another way to explore change; architecture as a projection of the mind needs to be redefined at every generation.

Together, we sought to explore the boundaries between the natural and artificial

He would listen to every new voice – something rare for academics, especially in Italy! – and absorb them into his personal, ever-evolving Weltanschauung.

His love for the living world was intense, and so too was his concern for the climate crisis. A few months before his passing, he left us a publication with a pantheistic title, Only Becoming Nature Will Save Us. Only if architecture can endorse a broader definition, it can play a role in today's defining crises.

We would often cite together Bucky Fuller's idea of a "utopia or oblivion moment". These words inspired the work we had begun together for the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025.

I was fortunate to collaborate with him towards the end of his career. Together, we sought to explore the boundaries between the natural and artificial – as in Francesco Mutti's tree-invaded home in Parma, or in the design for a radical decarbonisation scheme in Helsinki called the Hot Heart.

The last projects we did together will be presented this year at Milan design week – some organic structures made of rice for ENI at the Botanical Garden and an installation on circularity for Saviola, which reinterprets on a massive scale Louis Poulsen's PH Artichoke Lamp.

Italo's determination and imagination might have been at odds with his generosity and gentleness. However, they came together harmoniously in that fragile persona who arrived in our office clad in colorful Miyake Homme plissé dresses or original Red Guard uniforms – leaving captivated, fascinated, and filled every person who crossed paths with him with affection. Like architecture, clothing, as a second skin, is also a projection of the mind.

He was an innovator, the real kind

He was an innovator, the real kind. One of those who can focus not only on new solutions but on new questions (so much more difficult!). He always began with an extremely rational dissection of reality, which he then metabolised in his own unique way with expressions rich in poetry and metaphors.

When his illness surprised him a little over a year ago, we questioned him anxiously after his first doctor's appointment. What was the diagnosis? He quipped: "I fear that my body is about to lose symmetry". Together, we joked about this many times: it was about time, over a hundred years after Le Corbusier, to lose symmetry!

Now, without him, the loss is ours.

Carlo Ratti is an Italian architect who is the founder of Carlo Ratti Associati and director of the MIT Senseable City Lab. He will be the director of the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2025.

The photo is by Andrea Cassi.

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As TikTok and other platforms become increasingly flooded with home-styling ideas, Michelle Ogundehin shares advice on how to navigate changing trends in the era of ubiquitous social media.

Newspaper journalists are often keen for a quote on "the latest trends". What do I think of polka dots? What about red paint: hot right now, non? It depends. Or recently, what could I say about the TikTok trend "bookshelf wealth"? Hmmm, interesting.

Obviously, just because images of a lot of spotty things have been cobbled together by someone on Instagram, or an influencer declares in breathless tones that poppy has surpassed magnolia in the paint stakes, does not make it universally true. But this is not to flagellate the notion of "trends" per se – the stylistic movements that visualise our cultural climate can be genuinely intriguing.

Here-today-over-tomorrow fads can be noxious

True trends always answer a need. Emerging from an alchemy of desire, available resources, and cultural resonance, they have the power to make visible unspoken truths. However, the here-today-over-tomorrow fads can be noxious. The thing is, true trends don't occur in a vacuum; you can always trace their roots. In short, no roots = no relevance = fad. And I'll come back to the bookshelves.

Alternatively, it's called marketing. Because someone, somewhere will make money from you feeling compelled to throw out your perfectly good cushion, frock, phone, or sofa to replace it with a newer, more "on-trend", faster, smaller, prettier, or any other adjective you care to insert here, model.

Social media platform-time is bought to advance the cause and propel the message. Whether it has staying power though, is entirely another matter. This is where the aforementioned relevance and roots come in.

Arguably there are moments when it seems as if one creative camp has agreed on a singular approach. The spring special April issues of the fashion magazines collectively trill that "it's all about pastels!" But is it? Or did the picture desks just pull together all the sugary-coloured images from across the collections of 20 different designers and call it a moment?

After all, it's habitual for colours to lighten in the spring and darken as we approach winter. More of note would be if everyone went grey for April. But that probably wouldn't make for an uplifting (ie sales-savvy) coverline.

It's the same in interiors. When I was editor-in-chief of ELLE Decoration, occasionally I'd receive a letter from a disgruntled reader bemoaning the season's hot new look. Why had it changed from last month's look, which they loved?

As consumers and designers, we must self-interrogate

My reply was always the same: my job is to show you what's out there, your job is to decide what you like, and then stick to it. Or change if you want to. But the key is that it's your choice. What I always wanted to add was: and don't devolve the responsibility for your taste!

It's also true that there used to be a bit of a journalistic mantra that went along the lines of: one's an oddity, two's a coincidence, but three's a trend! So, if three of a similar thing plopped into the inbox, then it was worth looking into.

However, the follow-up question is always: why? Why is this happening? Is there anything behind it? Just because something is new doesn't make it news. And, crucially, is it adding anything to the cultural conversation?

I think this latter point is ever more relevant today. It can no longer be justified to create for the sake of it (that is arguably the purpose of art). Instead, as consumers and designers, we must self-interrogate.

Has this product genuinely improved the models that precede it by using less resources, demanding less energy, eradicating plastic, and thus being less likely to end up as waste? If not, then why make it?

That aside, sometimes a "trend" reflects more of a mood than a whole "moment". Take the unexpected red "trend". We could post-rationalise this as being rooted simply in a feeling of dark times drawing us to colour. It makes us happier.

Engaging your own inner critic becomes ever more vital

On the other hand, red is a deeply emotive hue, one of the most visible of the spectrum, thus a colour that intrinsically demands our attention. This is why it's used for both stop and sale signs. We're literally hardwired to see it. So, is this a verifiable trend, or merely the power of colour theory? Maybe it doesn't matter?

However, when considering social-media trends, we generally only see more of what we think we already like. This is fine when we're talking pops of colour, a lot less so regarding deep fakes deliberately designed to thwart opinions.

Bottom line, engaging your own inner critic becomes ever more vital. The platforms will always deliver a constant stream of fodder, but to paraphrase the inimitable Coco Chanel: content is what's out there – but it's up to you to choose what to believe.

Now back to those bookshelves. The images themselves are irrelevant. If someone was to go out and buy books by the metre to "get the look" then they've missed the point entirely; let's not reduce the notion of home to a mere backdrop – it should be your personalised space from which to thrive.

Thus, to me, "bookshelf wealth" is the visual expression of the authenticity that we're currently craving in a world that appears to have gone right royally tits up. Homes with shelves bursting with well-read tomes, curiosities and the talismans of life, however quirky, are an antidote to the virtual.

It dwells firmly in the tactile and tangible world of the analogue as so beautifully depicted recently in Wim Wenders' latest film, Perfect Days, wherein the main protagonist lives contentedly in his chosen world of flip phones, cassette tapes and simple routine.

Stop the press! A trend that reflects the rejection of the maelstrom of modern life

It's about honouring yourself, your journey, your interests, and proudly displaying it all. It stands on the shoulders of the movements we've seen already towards fermenting, knitting, and baking sourdough. It's about truth-telling and slowing-down; renovating not relocating; ditching the work/spend cycle and stepping off the consumer conveyor belt.

It's not so much a look as a potent signifier of a shifting of priorities. It's back-to-basics and living on a human-needs-first scale, as an antidote to the prevalent norm of life being voraciously consumed at technological pace to maximise productivity for someone else.

Stop the press! A trend that reflects the rejection of the maelstrom of modern life, indicating long-term thinking and emotional evolution to be the way forward. That may not make for a super snappy soundbite, but it certainly bodes better for our future than crimson walls, or polka dots.

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, showing House M by Studio Vaaro, is by Scott Norsworthy.

Dezeen In Depth
If you enjoy reading Dezeen's interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.

The post "True trends always answer a need" appeared first on Dezeen.

Peter Barber's architecture proves that providing social housing at scale without making the design mistakes of the past is eminently possible, writes Owen Hatherley as part of our Social Housing Revival series.

Once upon a time, everyone knew how to solve a housing crisis, or at least they thought they did. The solution was quantity. You can see the results of this numbers game, played all around the world in the mid-20th century, in the dun brick towers of the New York City Housing Authority or the prefabricated blocks of suburban Warsaw or Prague.

But if you want a particularly good picture of what that solution looked like at its least architect-driven, good places to begin are the south-east London inner suburbs of Charlton and Woolwich.

Aside from some pretty esplanades of trees, little thought went into communal spaces or public buildings

Almost nobody has tried anything fancy here. From the 1920s until the 1970s, almost every single unit of housing built here was social housing, mostly council housing. In 1924, this was an area of dense, overcrowded terraces without hot water or inside toilets, riddled with damp and vermin, owned by exploitative private landlords. By 1974, it wasn't.

For over 50 years, social housing was the only game in town. Nonetheless, the trend for many decades here too has been away from social housing. Two large housing estates in the area, both erected by the London County Council using prefabricated concrete building systems, have been demolished in the 21st century – the Ferrier Estate in nearby Kidbrooke, and Morris Walk, in Charlton, close to the river. The first was replaced with a mixed development with a net loss of social housing, the latter is still a building site.

So, combined with the general unaffordability of housing for even many middle-class Londoners, this means there's again a serious need for more social housing. The London Borough of Greenwich is now actually building some, and much of it is to the designs of Peter Barber Architects, justly one of the most praised designers of social housing in recent years.

I know the area well; I lived in a 1950s block here for six years. If you'd moved – as I had – from a subdivided space above a shop owned by an unscrupulous landlord, it was a relief to be in a purpose-built flat with plenty of storage, surrounded by green space, with the flat flooded with light: all the result of a basic acknowledgement that housing is meant to be lived in, not profited from (though as a private tenant I was paying around double what many of my neighbours were).

But, aside from some pretty esplanades of trees, little thought went into communal spaces or public buildings. It works, without ever being exciting.

The first thing you notice about Barber's housing here is that it is exciting. This is something to look at and explore, and – unlike the earlier housing – gives something to those who don't already live in it. Barber's buildings at Harvey Gardens in Charlton consist of a courtyard of houses and flats for senior citizens, packed in behind a typically bleak council playground.

Each of these Barber projects is an example of enjoyable, imaginative architecture

It displays a panoply of different formal devices packed into a small space – canted bay windows, barrel roofs, porthole windows, with everything picked out in a pale red brick; and it is extremely dense, especially when compared with the spacious, rangy approach to social housing demonstrated all around it.

Ten minutes walk uphill from here in Charlton Village, literally stuffed into the space behind a car park is Woodmore Mews (pictured), the most fun of these mini-estates. The two little brick towers that greet you between the parked cars are classic examples of Barber's peculiar fusion of early Victorian nostalgia and early modernist nostalgia, like a Constructivist Old Curiosity Shop.

These lead effortlessly into a tiny pedestrian street with a rhythm of heroic arches, in his now-patented Lilliputian Karl Marx Hof manner. Walk another 10 minutes, past the grounds of the old Woolwich Barracks, and you'll come to Sandpit Place, a group of three terraces between a 1970s low-rise vernacular estate and a lone block of 1960s deck-access maisonettes.

It is the nearest of the three to ordinary British housing, but even then, it is unusually imaginative, showing the influence of Victorian Tyneside flats on the firm's work – basically rows of flats that look to the untrained eye like houses, here full of odd little balconies, terraces and bays.

What is clear in all of these compared with the surrounding housing is that a great deal of effort has been made to emphasise quality rather than quantity, at least within a minimal budget. Each of these Barber projects is an example of enjoyable, imaginative architecture, a peculiar response to a peculiar site.

And those sites often are very peculiar indeed, as much of the council housing being proposed and built today in London, after decades of near-zero construction, is a matter of small council enclaves crammed into odd in-between council-owned spaces, often in existing estates. On the site of a car park or a row of garages, on some scraggy space left over after planning, on the site of a closed community centre.

What we need is more than clever little enclaves on the edges of existing estates

These projects demonstrate amply that this is not, contrary to what some campaigners might argue, a bad thing – aside from providing badly needed genuinely affordable housing, each of these projects enlivens the area rather than detracting from it, and the increased density that results doesn't ever feel like overcrowding. But there are only so many places like these.

The housing crisis in London and overheated cities like it is on such a scale that on larger sites – particularly publicly owned ones – social housing should have priority. This has not been the case here, or in other parts of London.

While it might seem walking around the estates of SE7 and SE18 that the free market has done little here, in fact the biggest publicly owned sites, like Morris Walk and the Ferrier Estate, and biggest of all, the enormous riverside site of the old Royal Arsenal arms factory complex, have all gone to developers, who have used them to build mainly market housing.

Social housing has become a matter of enclaves and micro-sites. Because of this, little can really be done in such projects except alleviating the effects of councils' own demolition projects – these three estates put together, for instance, only makes up a small proportion of the amount of council housing lost in the demolition of Morris Walk.

So what we need is more than clever little enclaves on the edges of existing estates – we need big new social housing projects, big enough to clear waiting lists. But then, if council housing became a numbers game again, wouldn't we just expect more of the decent and diverse but basically uninspired and drab architecture that fills the streets and hills of places like Charlton and Woolwich?

This is where Peter Barber's architecture in particular is important. Barber's architecture is, to quote John Peel on the music of The Fall, "always the same, always different". There is a common repertoire of simple forms and straightforward devices, using materials that even the most basic builders can manage, which provide visual interest without needing bespoke components, complex technologies or anything the always-backward British construction industry can screw up. There is a rare mastery of spaces that actually invite walking rather than driving.

Barber's work shows that it's very easy – and even, cheap – to avoid that straggly, vague, anti-urban feeling of some of the council housing built here in those 50 years where this was all that was built. This work proves it is possible to provide mass social housing that achieves both quality and quantity.

Owen Hatherley is a critic and author, focusing on architecture, politics and culture. His books include Militant Modernism (2009),  The Ministry of Nostalgia (2016), Modern Buildings in Britain – a Gazetteer (2022) and most recently  Artificial Islands (Repeater, 2022).

The photo is by Morley Von Sternberg.

Social Housing Revival

This article is part of Dezeen's Social Housing Revival series exploring the new wave of quality social housing being built around the world, and asking whether a return to social house-building at scale can help solve affordability issues and homelessness in our major cities.

The post "Social housing has become a matter of enclaves and micro-sites" appeared first on Dezeen.

Micro homes are not a humane response to the homelessness crisis, writes Cynthia Griffith as part of our Social Housing Revival series.

Homelessness has reached a historic high in the United States of America, casting a long, formidable shadow over millions of low and middle-income workers. According to the United Nations, homeless people represent more than 2 per cent of the global population and an astonishing 1.6 billion people are enduring inadequate housing conditions worldwide.

Contrary to the misguided popular narrative that implies homelessness is the result of one or more personal flaws, studies continue to prove that it is housing, and specifically a lack of affordable housing, causing the current crisis.

It may seem that such a drastic housing problem deserves a cutting-edge design solution. That line of thinking usually manifests itself in various forms of micro home – the basic idea being to provide some form of shelter at the lowest possible cost to cash-strapped public bodies. Things like weather-proof cardboard boxes, underground domes, pallet shelters, and insulated tents have all made their way to the drawing board.

         'We shouldn't be reinventing the wheel, or rather the floorplan'

But these so-called solutions are neither permanent nor practical. They do not properly address the root causes of the homelessness problem. And they are not humane enough to address what is undoubtedly a humanitarian crisis. When it comes to building housing for the homeless population, we shouldn't be reinventing the wheel, or rather the floorplan.

"We actually know how to solve this crisis," National Homelessness Law Center senior policy director Eric Tars told me. "We don't need a new, innovative solution."

According to Tars and his colleagues, rather than devising new ways to fit basic domestic amenities into micro-units and impossibly small spaces, architects should be vying for the expansion of social housing, and prioritizing projects that mass produce substantial, properly sized homes. Not only is this more cost-effective and environmentally friendly in the long run, but it's also the most humane way to combat homelessness.

Tiny homes look relatively glamorous when they're fitted with the latest modern amenities and meticulously decorated to impress those viewing reels on architecture TikTok, but in reality, the tiny lifestyle is often not fit to scale.

Trying to squeeze basic domestic necessities into spaces the size of prison cells has garnered some pretty devastating results. There have been notorious incidents where trendy tiny homes went up in flames and the homeless veterans inside them were forced to relive warlike trauma as the walls of these contraptions literally melted down around their ears.

Constructions like this that are fire hazards are not environmentally friendly. In fact, they can contribute to the raging wildfires we must already contend with, particularly in places like California, where the homeless population is higher than anywhere else in the United States.

Everyone – including people who are street homeless – should be able to live in a substantial, properly sized home

The US, as a nation, has collectively spent millions of tax dollars constructing pint-sized pallet shelters that are either too small or too cheaply made to safely house even the most basic domestic features. These constructions lack things like electricity, wi-fi, running water, and even private bathrooms. Should we, in the future, succeed in designing even tinier toilets and microscopic wi-fi routers, it would only take the tiny trend to even greater extremes.

Like an over-enthusiastic hairdresser, there always lies the temptation for urban planners to just keep trimming housing down until the final product resembles something closer to a closet than a house. Take, for example, the coffin homes of Hong Kong, their moniker a haunting reminder that they are about the same size as a hollow grave, with interiors as grim as a reaper.

Tenants in these tiny abodes are too cramped to even stand and are forced to spend all of their indoor leisure time sitting or sleeping due to the confines of the three-by-six-foot space. Many of these micro units are fitted with itty bitty toilets, small lights, and electric fans. Some of them even sport television sets and microwaves.

But do our fellow humans really deserve to live in a room the size of a cage? What does this say of how we really feel about our houseless neighbors?

"Adequate housing is about more than just the bare minimum needed for subsistence," said Tars. "It's about creating a healthy place where people can achieve their full potential as human beings and live a dignified life. If we're stripping things out that contribute to that essential feature, including space, then it's not going to be adequate housing."

Tiny homes are not the big solution to homelessness that we need. Where we live plays a huge part in who we are and how other members of society view us. In a civilized society, everyone – including people who are street homeless – should be able to live in a substantial, properly sized home.

Cynthia Griffith is a US-based journalist specialising in social justice and environmental issues. She writes for homelessness magazine Invisible People and has personal lived experience of homelessness.

The photo is courtesy of Lehrer Architects.

Social Housing Revival

This article is part of Dezeen's Social Housing Revival series exploring the new wave of quality social housing being built around the world, and asking whether a return to social house-building at scale can help solve affordability issues and homelessness in our major cities.

The post "Tiny homes are not the big solution to homelessness that we need" appeared first on Dezeen.

Graffiti on the abandoned Oceanwide Plaza towers is a physical manifestation of increasing tensions over the wealth disparities that blight downtown Los Angeles, writes Shane Reiner-Roth.

The battle of Oceanwide Plaza is a preview of the social and economic tensions that will increasingly take place across Los Angeles as it sprints towards the 2028 Summer Olympics.

This billion-dollar tomb to foreign real-estate speculation in the western corner of downtown Los Angeles (DTLA), laid hollow since 2019, was revived early this year by graffiti artists and paragliders that made it their night-time playground. The city council was quick to posture against "dangerous" trespassing, but has not yet been able to fully prevent the takeover.

Chauffeurs dodge panhandlers to escort their clients directly to the front doors of exclusive restaurants

For anyone needing visual evidence of regional wealth inequality in present-day LA, a visit to its downtown should do the trick. The pristine towers of international banks and oil companies in the Financial District twinkle in short distance from the tents of the growing unhoused population spilling beyond the sidewalks of Skid Row. The streets between the two enclaves are an ongoing contest for representation, as chauffeurs dodge panhandlers and skater punks to escort their clients directly to the front doors of exclusive restaurants, and USC-frat bar crawls leapfrog small businesses shuttered by staggering rent spikes.

The arrival of Staples Center (since renamed Crypto.com Arena) in 1999 enticed a thousand developers to South Park, the western corner of DTLA bordering the Financial District, and they set about constructing venues for business and tourism far beyond the human scale. Rampant infill development transformed the sector into a questionable cultural destination, anchored by the steel-and-glass-fortress structures of LA Live and the Los Angeles Convention Center, whose public displays of inequality are accompanied by an omnipresent security presence.

This course of development escalated during mid-2010s rumors (and 2018 confirmation) that Los Angeles would host the Summer Olympics in 2028, the third time the city will host the international sporting event.

NOlympics, a prominent local activist organization, spoke out against the decision, claiming that the Olympic Games "always accelerate policing, evictions, inequality, exploitation, and the erosion of democracy in every host city". This was true when the Olympics were first held in Los Angeles in 1932, when law enforcement drove the poor out of the city at the height of the Great Depression, and it was true in 1984, when the second iteration ignited racial and economic tensions, precipitating the 1992 uprisings less than a decade later.

The public sector of Los Angeles, meanwhile, has sworn to minimize the development of critical infrastructure, claiming the groundwork had been sufficiently laid during Olympics past, thus leaving it up to private enterprise to construct whatever it sees fit. Compare this to other cities that have hosted, including London, Tokyo and Barcelona, which constructed thousands of average-priced housing units in anticipation of the games. Wholly unconcerned with history, international developers competed for the few remaining plots surrounding Crypto.com Arena, the future host of Olympic basketball games.

It is only this type of building misuse, of course, that could bring political urgency to 1101 Flower Street

Oceanwide Holdings, a Beijing-based publicly traded conglomerate, began building in 2015 on Oceanwide Plaza across the street from the venue, at 1101 Flower Street. The $1 billion used to erect the glassy, 53-storey-tall exteriors of the three towers defining the complex, designed to include luxury condominiums and a five-star Park Hyatt hotel above a three-story mall, was spent in vain. Construction was halted in 2019 due to "financing challenges" – one of the many risks of real-estate speculation that should deter reckless development, but doesn't.

An obstructive eyesore barricaded on all sides, the towers were pillars of urban misuse for years before spray paint ever touched glass. The mind reels when considering all the more worthwhile things $1 billion could have funded in the city aside from a money pit.

The people of Los Angeles waited patiently for half a decade to make use of a useless site. Unsanctioned spray paint, paragliding equipment, and rooftop steaks made Oceanwide Plaza a more vibrant site in reality than any marketing campaign ever could in imagination.

Videos endlessly shared on Instagram depict Oceanwide Plaza as a living organism whose facade changes appearance as routinely as a snake sheds its skin. Fittingly enough, the re-awakened towers became a provocative backdrop to the 66th Annual Grammy Awards when the glitzy ceremony in honor of an increasingly stratified industry was held across the street in early February.

It is only this type of building misuse, of course, that could bring political urgency to 1101 Flower Street. While protecting people is the message, protecting property is the principle. The Los Angeles Police Department has already spent more than 3,000 hours at the site, buzzing its helicopters around the buildings to spotlight, and later arrest, dozens of occupants while the Los Angeles City Council voted to allot nearly $4 million to remove the graffiti and reinforce the barricades.

The energy visible on the facades of Oceanwide Plaza is that of the city itself

Another money pit, and an equally futile one, too, as graffiti artists have only since found new ways to enter the site. However apparent antagonisms already were between economic classes in Downtown Los Angeles, the unfolding events at Oceanwide Plaza have spelled them out that much more plainly.

The marketing team for LA28 doesn't know how right it is when it boasts that LA "is an infinite canvas to pursue your wildest dreams" (the irony of which is only intensified by the use of a graffiti-style "A" in the LA28 logo). The energy visible on the facades of Oceanwide Plaza is that of the city itself; that fact has been laid bare by the local enthusiasm for their efforts.

For the next four years, underserved Angelenos tired of their treatment by the city and private enterprise would be well advised to regularly check in on 1101 Flower Street.

Shane Reiner-Roth is a writer, photographer, curator and educator. He is a lecturer at the University of Southern California and is studying for a PhD at the University of California, Los Angeles. His writing has appeared in The Architect's Newspaper, Architectural Record and Architectural Digest.

The photo is by Shane Reiner-Roth.

Dezeen In Depth
If you enjoy reading Dezeen's interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.

The post "The people of Los Angeles waited patiently for half a decade to make use of a useless site" appeared first on Dezeen.

Seven years after declaring: "I am not a female architect. I am an architect", Dorte Mandrup writes that gender-based lists remain a symptom of an industry that is changing too slowly.

Seven years ago, I wrote an opinion piece published under the headline: I am not a female architect. I am an architect. Written as a critical response to Dezeen's 50 inspirational female architects and designers to mark International Women's Day – a list on which I was included – I posed the question of whether we were not long overdue retiring these well-meaning lists and awards for women.

By some, it was considered controversial – even anti-feminist. To this day, it still baffles me that it can be deemed controversial to suggest that women should be allowed to work and compete within the same parameters as their male peers. To ask to simply be considered an architect and not constantly categorised by my gender.

We have long proven that architectural merit cannot be confined by gender

Let me make it very clear, the article did not attempt to shrug off the importance of highlighting the significant impact of women in architecture. Quite the contrary. The contributions made by women across the globe are as immense as they are diverse.

We have long proven that architectural merit cannot be confined by gender. Despite this, women remain an anomaly in the architectural curriculum. In the recently published 100 Women: Architects in Practice book, which showcases a sample of work and practices of women from all over the world, authors Harriet Harriss, Naomi House, Monika Parrinder and Tom Ravenscroft describe their book as a "product of an unequal profession" that is regrettably still relevant.

Equally, my criticism is not on the recognition itself, but that the persistent need for distinction is a symptom of inequality and prejudice. It should be common practice to include women in the general architectural discourse.

The question is whether we have progressed far enough to leave special mentions and categories in the past. Despite their honourable intentions, the Brit Awards managed to leave out women entirely when they removed their gender-specific best artist categories.

The tide is turning very slowly

Though architecture has seen some progress in recent years, the tide is turning very slowly, and it is disheartening, to say the least, that we still need to spend time discussing the evident gender disparity in our industry when we should be much further in creating a diverse and equitable profession beyond gender.

As I wrote my article in the spring of 2017, thousands of people had already gathered for the Women's March in January to advocate for gender equality and civil rights. Societal frustration was looming, and in October #MeToo became a worldwide movement prompting women to speak out against harassment and discrimination.

While it sadly didn't come as a surprise for those of us who work in architecture, it provided an important platform to expose an abusive culture that has been allowed to exist within the profession for far too long. #MeToo pushed the needle.

We cannot simply wait for society to catch up and policy makers to act

It highlighted the deep-rooted power structures that sexism is a symptom of and that equally manifest itself in other discriminatory behaviour: opportunities that haven't been given, qualifications that haven't been recognised, being overlooked and even ignored, and facing lower expectations simply because of your gender.

Some of this is influenced by societal structures, but we cannot simply wait for society to catch up and policymakers to act. Companies, institutions, and industry leaders need to take action – and we can start by examining ourselves. We know from countless surveys that women are underrepresented and underpaid.

While women make up nearly fifty per cent of architecture graduates in places like the US, UK, and Denmark, this balance is not reflected in company structures. Many even leave the profession entirely.

What are the underlying factors that push them away or prevent them from succeeding? Have we created the necessary cultural changes within our institutions and studios to make sure that women have the same opportunities as their male peers? How do power relations influence gender equality?

A couple of years ago, our studio took it upon ourselves to examine the power structures in Danish architecture. Browsing through employees on websites, it already becomes clear that partner groups are generally dominated by men, but since it can be difficult to determine the internal structures by titles alone, we looked up the 40 largest architecture studios in the Danish Central Business Register to find out how ownership is distributed between genders.

In an owner-driven industry, power and leadership are undeniably tied together

Ten of the studios are owned by engineering firms and large international companies. Of the remaining 30, there is only one where a woman holds majority ownership. In an owner-driven industry, power and leadership are undeniably tied together, and the question of power is important because power gives you the privilege to hire, fire, promote, or even exclude – consciously or not.

However, it also provides an opportunity for owners and leaders to take concrete action. Examine your own business. Do you pay an equal salary? There is absolutely no reason for there to be a large or – even worse – widening gender pay gap. Start there.

Secondly, make an active choice to have women represented at all levels in your company. For those of us with practices in countries with almost fifty per cent female graduates in recent years, there should be no excuse. It is simply a matter of willingness. In my 25 years as a studio owner, there has never been a time when it was difficult to find qualified women to fill a position.

If you still find it difficult, expand your network. And for those claiming that women simply want something else; that they don't want the responsibility of being partner, or that they don't strive to start their own practices: I have never found this to be the case. But we need to create an industry where women are able to imagine that it is possible. If they cannot, then we have failed. So let us collectively speed up the pace of progress.

Dorte Mandrup is the founder and creative director of Dorte Mandrup Arkitekter in Copenhagen. 

The photography is by Tuala Hjarnø.

The post "Women remain an anomaly in the architectural curriculum" appeared first on Dezeen.

It's now 20 years since a solo woman won the Pritzker Architecture Prize. The profession's most prestigious award must do better, writes Tom Ravenscroft.

It is 20 years since Zaha Hadid won the Pritzker Architecture Prize, yet somehow she remains the only solo woman to have won the accolade.

Just days before International Women's Day today, the Pritzker jury again named a man – this time Riken Yamamoto – as this year's laureate. It is the third year in a row that a solo man has been given the award. For Pritzker, this is very much business as usual.

Since Hadid's victory two decades ago, the prize has been awarded to individual men on 16 occasions. All of the women that have been awarded the honour, aside from Hadid, have been in partnerships – nearly always with men. Are there really no more women deserving of architecture's highest prize?

           'Yamamoto takes the tally of Japanese male winners to eight'

After a brief dabble in recognising the work of women architects – Yvonne Farrell and Shelley McNamara winning in 2020 and Lacaton & Vassal in 2021 – it looks like the Pritzker Prize has now reverted to form, again presenting the award to a very established Japanese architect. Yamamoto takes the tally of Japanese male winners to eight, pulling two clear of the total number of female winners in the global award's 45-year history.

The Pritzker jury's ongoing recognition of male architects from the Global North is either a damning reflection of the state of architecture or a damning reflection of Pritzker's view of what is significant architecture.

The prize is awarded each year to a living architect who has "produced consistent and significant contributions to humanity and the built environment through the art of architecture". For its first 25 years, the prize recognised the leading, best-known, international starchitects – all of whom, of course, were men. The majority were from traditional, western architectural strongholds – the USA, UK, France, Germany and Italy, and so on.

However, in recent years, its emphasis has changed, recognising a broader range of people contributing to the profession: RCR Arquitectes's small-scale work, Alejandro Aravena's community-driven practice and numerous partnerships celebrating collaboration – Kazuyo Sejima and Ryue Nishizawa, Farrell and McNamara, and Lacaton & Vassal.

The RIBA Royal Gold Medal is proving that gender balance and correction for historic neglect is possible

And, of course, diversity is not solely about gender – Diébédo Francis Kéré's victory was almost universally welcomed when he became the first African architect to win in 2022. Yamamoto's work, and its clear community-focus, also makes him a very worthy winner.

However, it seems there is still no room for solo women winners.

In the UK, the RIBA Royal Gold Medal is proving that gender balance and correction for historic neglect is possible for a lifetime achievement-style award, even for the most traditional of institutions. Over the past decade, its leading award has been presented to six women – Sheila O'Donnell, Hadid, McNamara, Farrell, Yasmeen Lari and Lesley Lokko, and six men – John Tuomey, Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Neave Brown, Nicholas Grimshaw, David Adjaye, Balkrishna Vithaldas Doshi.

It is possible!

The male domination of the Pritzker Prize seems almost wilful

Some may argue that for a lifetime achievement award it is impossible not to recognise those who have had long and extremely successful, undeniably influential careers – David Chipperfield for example.

It's no secret that the top jobs in architecture are dominated by men, so you might suggest that the Pritzker laureates merely reflect that reality.

However, the male domination of the Pritzker Prize seems almost wilful. Yamamoto is hardly a household name; the world could have handled waiting a couple of years to give him the award.

Meanwhile, there are so many women who have had long and influential careers in the traditional mode that Pritzker often celebrates. Consider, for example, Francine Houbine, who has been leading one of the world's largest studios, Mecanoo, for over 20 years; Jeanne Gang, founder of US powerhouse Studio Gang; or Danish architect Dorte Mandrup. If they are looking beyond the heads of major studios, then Lari, Frida Escobedo or Marina Tabassum are all worthy considerations still to get a look in.

Now it appears that these wins were merely a blip in prize's history

The campaign in 2013 to recognise Denise Scott Brown's omission from the prize when Robert Venturi won should have served as a wake-up call to the Pritzker Prize. Like in 2013, the Pritzker organisation may say that the winner is the choice of an independent jury, therefore out of their control, so this may be a simple place to start. This year's jury was made up of five men and two women – a rebalance is completely within the organisation's influence.

With Farrell and McNamara, Lacaton & Vassal and Kéré's victories it felt like change was in the air, with the prize broadening the spectrum of who is considered significant. However, it now appears that these wins were merely a blip in prize's history, much like Hadid's win 20 years ago.

The architecture profession is slowly changing, and for a while it seemed the Pritzker recognised that and was part of the change. Representation is important, and it is essential that the world's most prestigious architecture prize remembers to celebrate greater diversity in the industry.

Tom Ravenscroft is the editor of Dezeen.

The photo is courtesy of the Pritzker Architecture Prize.

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As the conflict in Gaza enters its sixth month, Edwin Heathcote reflects on the impossibility of architecture criticism in the face of such devastation.

There are some things that are difficult to write. And there are some things that have become almost impossible.

Is architecture criticism one of these? How can you write about buildings, about houses, about thoughtful plans and neat details while cities are being levelled in real time?

Architecture is hard; construction is in constant conflict with gravity and economy, it is the result of hard physical labour. Destruction is relatively, at least physically, easy. What Eisenhower dubbed the military/industrial complex is a shadowy section of the economy devoted to the design and manufacture of the hardware to destroy buildings. It exists almost as the negative of the construction industry geared to build them.

The pace of destruction and the sheer intensity of the loss of life in Gaza have made it impossible to ignore

We are used to seeing the shells of works in progress, those naked concrete frames with deep, dark, shadowy spaces behind, buildings being born. But we have also become used to the reverse process: endlessly mediated images of skeletal structures, their rebars and cables hanging out like viscera, their floors pancaked, the dusty belongings of now flattened families punctuating the rubble (we are not allowed to see bodies, ruins must stand in for them as metaphors for death).

We see fragments of wallpaper and furniture, bathroom fittings, the detritus of everyday lives displaced. The streets are covered with the grey moondust of obliteration.

It started a couple of years ago in Ukraine (though, of course, it started in Yemen, or Beirut, or Iraq, or Afghanistan, or back in Gaza the last time, or the time before that) but the pace of destruction and the sheer intensity of the loss of life in Gaza have made it impossible to ignore.

Whether this is genocide or not, there can be no doubt that it is urbicide; the deliberate destruction of cities as either collective punishment, pursuit of a single group, as a lesson to be taught or as a tactic. The Israel Defence Forces have used the destruction of homes as a form of collective punishment for decades; bulldozers have been among their most brutal weapons, more targeted and meaningful in their use than tanks. The destruction of homes is a cipher for expulsion, the obliteration of belonging.

Of course we understand that Hamas too used the city for its purposes, undermining, tunnelling, dispersing within it and we understand that the incursion on 7 October was a territorial and murderous act. It was an attack against the walls and fences currently so fetishised around the world as the solution to immigration or invasion – and yet so proving useless.

But this is not about the politics or the injustice. This is about the fragility of architecture and its incapacity to protect, and it is about the cultural infrastructure of architecture – the critics and the exhibitions, the profession, the advertising the media.

I have been profoundly struggling with this for months, the sense of dread and impotence

Not because critics matter – in fact precisely because clearly we do not matter. Our voices carry virtually no weight here. Architecture criticism? Really? How can we avert our eyes and write about beautiful homes or enriching museums? We do, because we are paid, that is our job. But it is with a sense of creeping irrelevance.

I have been profoundly struggling with this for months, the sense of dread and impotence. So much of the contemporary discourse is about decolonisation, about care, about belonging and identity. Yet here this thing is.

Part of the impossibility of writing about the impossibility of writing is that you become acutely aware that you are subverting the tragedy and making it about you. And it is an easy, unavoidable snipe. This is not about us, the critics and the writers, the journalists and the editors and the consumers of those media or the curators and academics who often have prominent voices and platforms.

But then how do we pretend that what we do matters? I am under little illusion that my writing can make a difference here. And that is the problem. This is an existential crisis for Gazans whose state is being flattened but if we avoid the question it is curtains for us. Gaza will be rebuilt, but how will we rebuild our discourse if we continue to ignore the destruction and see it only as news and not as culture?

The compartmentation of the media into these separate sections: domestic news, foreign news, business news, culture, art and design, creates a distinction that is logical but dangerous. The impossibility of traversing and subverting the sections amplifies the isolation and the inability of culture to address the crisis clearly.

As architects and critics, we are complicit in a way of thinking that posits architecture as a mechanism for improvement, a creation of a place in which lives can be lived and meaning constructed. When we see how casually it can be destroyed we become silent.

Whether in Bakhmut or Gaza, those cities of dust make our work more painful

Those images of Gaza haunt our dreams. The dark holes where once there were windows and shutters, the plumes of black smoke, the grey dust which obscures everything and makes the images appear in monochrome, cities stripped of colour as they have been denuded of inhabitants. The heaps of concrete, beams, blocks and bricks smashed and crumpled, the rubble that was once so crowded with life. Is this still architecture? Or has it become something else?

When all that's left is rubble, is that construction, destruction or archaeology? That grey dust coats everything. It metaphorically settles on our keyboards at great distances. Whether in Bakhmut or Gaza, those cities of dust make our work more painful.

And then, there it is. As soon as you do begin to attempt to write about the ruins, it becomes almost by default an aestheticisation, an objectification.

We spend our lives attempting to escape that objectification, to express something of the impossibly entangled nature of architecture as an expression of societal, economic, political and commercial currents, yet we find ourselves back at its most basic of cliches – buildings reduced to rubble. It is as reductive as the fact itself.

This is not intended as self-care or self-pity, though I admit it feels cathartic to write about the impossibility of writing. Rather it is about a reassessment of how, and why, we engage.

Can we write about this? How can we not write about this? And in writing about anything else other than this, what are we doing? And are we, in fact, always writing about this, even when we are not writing about this anyway?

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.

The photo is by Shutterstock. Comments have been turned off on this story due to the sensitive nature of the subject matter.

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Architecture has a long tradition of famous figures working well into their old age but sometimes it's best to know when to stop, writes Catherine Slessor.

Though it seems like only yesterday that the ribbon was being cut on the Bilbao Guggenheim, Frank Gehry turned 95 at the end of February.

Architecture's original enfant terrible, the charismatic scavenger who audaciously ornamented his Santa Monica house with chain-link fencing and propelled Bilbao into the European short-break big league, Gehry might now be better described as un vieux terrible, unrepentantly giving journalists the finger at press conferences and designing fatuous, limited edition handbags for Louis Vuitton.

If Gehry matches Niemeyer, that's another nine years of terrible handbags

Along with others of his generation, Gehry shows no signs of easing up and going gently into that good night. At 88 years young, Norman Foster recently assumed the helm of Domus for 2024 as part of the magazine's centenary project to devolve its editorship to 10 starchitects over 10 years.

Though Foster is no longer able to pilot his own plane, he is regularly pictured on his Instagram feed being choppered over cities, sketchbook in hand, sustaining the impression that he is as engaged and productive as he ever was. Editing Domus is merely another prestigious side hustle.

Historically, architecture is an old man's game: IM Pei was 102 when he died, Philip Johnson 98, Frank Lloyd Wright 91 and Mies van der Rohe 83 (a relative stripling). Who can say how long Le Corbusier (77) may have lasted if he hadn't gone for that fateful dip in the Med?

Famously, Oscar Niemeyer kept going until he was 104, an astonishing span by any stretch of the imagination. If Gehry matches Niemeyer, that's another nine years of terrible handbags.

Around the millennium, American design magazine Metropolis produced a "Nine over 90" issue, a riposte to the more ubiquitous "40 under 40" format, in which there was no shortage of active nonagenarian architects and designers to ponder the contradictions of still working at their age. It included Morris Lapidus (98), Julius Shulman (90), and, inevitably, Philip Johnson (then 94).

Holed up in his New Canaan Glass House, working three days a week in New York and lunching at his corner table in the Four Seasons, Johnson's regime was that of someone at least 30 years younger. His admirers attributed his longevity and spryness to his vampiric interest in keeping a beady eye on successive younger generations in order to burnish his credentials as a tastemaker.

There should be nothing inherently dismaying about older people keeping going

By definition, architects are late bloomers. In the UK, it takes around 10 years to train and qualify, then perhaps another 10 to find your feet. If you've designed and built something by the age of 40, you're doing well.

But once on track and getting work, as Gehry, Foster and others amply demonstrate, it's perfectly possible to chunter on for another half-century. A typical architectural career arc tends to follow the rock star trajectory: youthful anonymity, exploding onto the scene, the difficult second album, cruise control and then, finally, recycling your greatest hits.

In a society rife with ageism, there should be nothing inherently dismaying about older people keeping going. Indeed, as the pensionable age inches inexorably upwards, the fantasy of retiring in your 50s or 60s is now just that.

But if you've done it all and made your pile, why continue hacking at the coalface? The Bilbao Guggenheim could have been a career-culminating moment for the then-68 year old Gehry. Instead he regarded it as a starting gun, going on to deliver a succession of increasingly indulgent and self-parodic schemes, including Seattle's Experience Music Project, described by Herbert Muschamp in The New York Times as "something that crawled out of the sea, rolled over and died", and the bloated extravagance of the Louis Vuitton Foundation, a costly car crash of a building inelegantly hunkered in Paris's Bois de Boulogne.

Like many starchitects of his era, Gehry has become a brand, plugged into the support structure of a huge international practice, which needs its ageing goose to keep laying those golden eggs. Since architecture is a collective endeavour, the old master is perpetually surrounded by scores of assistants, so for any slowing down that might occur, there are always plenty of obliging younger hands and minds to pick up the pace. These days, as Gehry tosses off insults and napkin sketches, you wonder how much of him is actually present in any of his designs.

There is a season and a time for everything

If such figureheads stagger on interminably, it also impinges on the ability of talented younger architects, toiling all hours in their firms, to develop a name for themselves. The starchitect whose genius and reputation might once have been a benevolent impetus to those in their orbit becomes something altogether less palatable by the time they are slapping their name on work performed by an army of underlings.

Unless you have the misfortune to expire prematurely – Zaha Hadid dying at 65 is perhaps the most conspicuous recent example — bowing out gracefully is a rare thing in the starchitect firmament. Some time before he died in 2021, Richard Rogers quietly quit the stage through ill health, and a well-oiled succession plan swung into action.

In 2022, the practice name formally changed to RSHP. "We wanted to avoid the situation where the name of the practice is someone who died 100 years ago," said Rogers. "Architecture is a living thing. If I want to leave something to the future, it has to be able to change."

Ending something is always hard; it takes courage to disengage cruise control. At the end of 2013, design collective FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) announced that it was splitting after 23 years. Rather like the Beatles break up, shockwaves reverberated around the architectural establishment; the Architects' Journal even published a memorial issue, with an ironic funeral wreath spelling out "FAT" on the cover.

Since then, the solo careers of Sean Griffiths, Charles Holland and Sam Jacob, FAT's merry pranksters, have been avidly scrutinised (rather like the Beatles), but in retrospect, it was the right thing to do, as they had outgrown the punk ethos of the original project.

Acknowledging that there is a season and a time for everything has to be more admirable than whirling incessantly and uncaringly on, never knowing when to stop.

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 J l Cereijido/EPA courtesy of Shutterstock.

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To help kick off our Social Housing Revival series, Peter Apps calls for a return to mass public house-building in cities around the world.

What does the future hold for our major cities? Urbanisation has been one of the most important trends of the modern era. More than half of the world's population now lives in urban areas – increasingly in large, very densely populated cities – and projections suggest this proportion will keep growing through to 2050.

But housing in urban centres is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

During recent years, enormous amounts of capital have been poured into acquiring real estate in cities, particularly after the global financial crisis of 2008 and the quantitative easing policies many central banks adopted in its aftermath.

          'Housing in urban centres is becoming increasingly unaffordable'

In 2013/14, corporate buying of larger properties in the world's 100 largest cities rose from $600 billion to $1 trillion. A 2017 UN-backed report said real estate represented 60 per cent of the value of all global assets, with residential real estate comprising 75 per cent of that total.

"Housing is at the centre of an historic structural transformation in global investment and the economies of the industrialized world, with profound consequences for those in need of adequate housing," the report said.

People trying to find a decent home in our major cities now compete with funds like Blackstone, an asset investor whose wealth exceeds the GDP of Denmark, and has been "purchasing multi-family rentals at unprecedented rates across the world" since 2008, according to research from independent human-rights experts.

They also compete with smaller portfolio investors who see homes as the route to financial security: something to be converted into an AirBnb or short-term rental unit.

This is a competition most of us simply cannot win, and the defeats are being played out in escalating social problems around the developed world.

In London, homelessness is at a historic high and primary schools are closing their doors because people are either deciding against having children or leaving the city to find family-sized housing elsewhere when they do.

The world can reach for the same solution it did in the early part of the 20th century

The city is now full of hungry, homeless children reliant on food banks to fill their stomachs and without a permanent place to call home. The Times recently ran a feature on a south London school were 80 per cent of the children live in statutory temporary accommodation for the homeless.

Children are also departing from major US cities, and homelessness in cities like New York has reached levels not seen since the Great Depression. In November 2023, there were 92,824 homeless people, including 33,365 homeless children, sleeping each night in the city's main municipal shelter system.

What can we do about this? Luckily, there is an answer. The world can reach for the same solution it did in the early part of the 20th century: providing housing as a public service instead of simply relying on the market.

In a 60-year period from the end of world war one to the rise of Thatcherite neo-liberalism in the 1980s, public housing transformed London. Gone were the Victorian slums, the families living in single rooms, the outside toilets, the exploitative landlords of Charles Dickens' era.

In their place were publicly-owned municipal housing estates – warm, safe, dry, spacious and affordable, with rents set according to formulas based on average local incomes. By 1981, 34.8 per cent of Londoners lived in social housing.

This was a base from which a very different city might have been built for the 21st century. Instead, the investment in social housing was choked off, homes were sold at a discount and the housing was neglected, allowed to decline and finally demolished in too many cases.

The private market is out of control because it no longer responds to individuals

Since then, with the adoption of modern fiscal rules and the rolling back of major state intervention in markets like housing, most of the world has not built public housing with anywhere near the same ambition.

But the demand has never been higher. Even in Paris – the capital city of a country where investment in social housing has always been comparatively high – there are 10 candidates for every vacant social home in the region, and more than 750,000 people waiting for social housing. The city faces a major dilemma ahead of the Olympic Games this summer: so many of its hotel rooms are being used to house the homeless that it may not have enough for the fans.

When we have built in major cities over recent decades, we have tended to serve the needs of the real-estate funds hungry for assets, not the citizens looking for a home and a decent job. London has seen a boom era of construction in the last decade. Since 2015, it has built 316,498 homes – almost two entire new boroughs. But just 7,526 have been for social rent. That's about 2 per cent.

We have built developments like Nine Elms – the new housing complex that surrounds the US embassy in London. Built by a joint venture between Irish property company Ballymore and the giant Malaysian investor EcoWorld, it has seen more than 5,000 homes built, with 15,000 still to come.

But while money has been found for a "Sky Pool" suspended 35 metres in the air and a new underground railway to boost its attractiveness to potential buyers, the developers have negotiated down the amount of affordable housing provided to just 18 per cent.

This is no future for our cities. The private market is out of control because it no longer responds to individuals, but the wealth of the planet's largest investors. The only way to break that cycle is to stop relying on the market.

It is a major investment, but it is one we cannot afford not to make

There are small, green shoots of progress to show this happening again. In London, public housing is coming back: local-government bodies are building homes for the first time since the 1970s. The numbers are still a fringe of the overall housing market, but the growth has been rapid. They are often among the most architecturally interesting projects the city has to offer.

In New York, local lawmakers recently voted to create a public housing developer that would charge residents no more than 25 per cent their income.

These projects could be the start. But we need a major shift in the way we look at public housing in our big cities: yes, it is a major investment, but it is one we cannot afford not to make.

The next 100 years will be challenging for cities. Populations will age, climate change will bring flooding, heat and fire, and technology will replace many of the jobs residents rely on today. To have a hope of surviving these challenges, people need the security of a place to live.

We need to start building these places, and public housing – not a market distorted by the vast treasure chests of the world's most wealthy investors – is the route to take.

Peter Apps is a London-based journalist specialising in social housing. He was formerly the deputy editor of Inside Housing and his book on the Grenfell Tower fire, titled Show Me The Bodies, won the 2023 Orwell Prize for political writing.

The photo, showing Bevan Road by Peter Barber Architects in south-east London, is by Morley von Sternberg.

Social Housing Revival

This article is part of Dezeen's Social Housing Revival series exploring the new wave of quality social housing being built around the world, and asking whether a return to social house-building at scale can help solve affordability issues and homelessness in our major cities.

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It's crucial that whoever wins the upcoming general election prioritises fixing the UK's energy-inefficient housing, but the message doesn't seem to be getting through to our political leaders, writes RIBA president Muyiwa Oki.

Last summer, as temperatures soared and the sun beat down relentlessly, people around the UK sweltered in their homes.

A few months ago, with near zero-degree temperatures, many of us found the reverse, struggling to decide whether to turn on the heating and bear the rising energy costs.

Despite our best efforts to stay cool or keep warm, our outdated built environment and energy-inefficient homes meant that escaping the stifling heat or freezing cold was nearly impossible. For some, it was not just uncomfortable – it was desperately dangerous.

It is clear something needs to be done

The state of Britain's ageing homes has become a national shame, and it is clear something needs to be done.

Stark warnings about rising temperatures hit the headlines this month. For the first time on record, global warming breached the critical 1.5-degrees threshold over a 12-month period. In the UK, it was the second-hottest year on record, as we suffered heatwaves and floods. Unfortunately, these trends are set to continue.

We know decarbonising the built environment is crucial to reducing carbon emissions and mitigating rising temperatures; our buildings are responsible for almost 40 per cent of global energy-related carbon emissions. The time to act is now.

With 80 per cent of the buildings that we'll use in 2050 already built today, we must prioritise bringing these up to scratch – and we need to start with housing. The UK has among the oldest and least energy-efficient housing stock in the whole of Europe, with 19 million homes in dire need of retrofitting.

Yet, this message doesn't seem to be getting through to our political leaders. On the very same day that the news broke about terrifying temperature rises in 2023, it was announced that Labour is cutting back on funding promises for home-insulation projects should the party win the upcoming general election. The previously announced £6 billion a year to retrofit 19 million homes has been dropped, with plans now to spend £6.6 billion over 5 years, equating to £1.3 billion a year.

It follows prime minister Rishi Sunak's September announcement that he would be scaling back key green policies – including postponing a ban on oil and liquified petroleum gas (LPG) boilers to 2035 and scrapping energy-efficiency improvements for the private rented sector.

To do nothing would be to condemn the population to many more decades of substandard housing

This general election year is a chance to reset the dial and treat the climate emergency as the urgent, existential threat that it is. To do this, we need the next government to set out a national retrofit strategy – a well-funded, long-term plan to make homes more energy efficient and climate resilient. Not only would this reduce our climate impact, but it would also create jobs, boost green skills and improve prosperity up and down the country.

Of course, this strategy requires ambitious government investment, but we at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) believe there are clever ways to incentivise homeowners to make their properties greener. A financing strategy to make energy-efficiency upgrades affordable for all homeowners and landlords before they feel the benefit of reduced energy bills will be a crucial piece of the puzzle.

In its 2020 Greener Homes report, the RIBA – along with many other organisations – recommend looking at tax incentives such as a sliding scale of stamp duty, with the most energy-efficient homes accruing significantly less tax than the least energy efficient, and tax rebates for a period after purchase to encourage homeowners to make energy-efficiency upgrades, recognising that they are most likely to make upgrades just after buying a house rather than getting round to it at a later date.

Equally, in the private rented sector, landlords should be incentivised to make energy-efficiency upgrades by being able to claim part of these against their income-tax liabilities.

Putting funding aside, retrofitting has to be done properly to avoid unintended consequences like damp and mould. To achieve this, we must prioritise a fabric-first, whole-house retrofit approach, using architects' expertise to ensure changes are made in the right order and at the right time. Possible measures include insulating lofts and walls, draught-proofing doors, windows and floors, using double or triple glazing, integrating smarter appliances and making changes to heating and energy systems such as heat pumps and solar panels.

A retrofit revolution will create jobs. Just installing external insulation to all England's interwar homes, built between 1919 and 1939, could create 5,000 full-time jobs every year until 2032. But it also demands good organisation – a systemic method of decarbonising homes, with defined typical upgrade packs for different housing types. Training will be required to upskill the construction workforce across the country to carry out the work efficiently and effectively.

A nationwide retrofit programme on this scale may be unprecedented, but we need to see the bigger picture. Millions of us live in damp, draughty homes that are leaking energy and money, and to do nothing about it would be to condemn the population to many more decades of substandard housing. I sincerely hope the next government turns this challenge into an opportunity to demonstrate global climate leadership and turbocharge our green economy.

Muyiwa Oki is the president of the Royal Institute of British Architects and an architect at construction company Mace.

The photo is by Lawrence Chismorie via Unsplash.

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Biomaterials have the potential to significantly cut carbon emissions but designers should approach them with caution to avoid creating a whole new set of problems, warns Sioban Imms.

The vision of a civilisation based on biomaterials is compelling: products, clothes and buildings made from materials that have been "grown", rather than derived from polluting, extractive fossil industries. The promise is not only lower emissions, but products that are more in tune with the environment – manufactured objects that are part of the natural cycle of life. And consumers are willing to pay a premium for such ostensibly "sustainable" products – 12 per cent more, according to a recent study by Bain.

However, in a bid to gain competitive advantage, marketing narratives surrounding biomaterials are regularly inflated or gloss over important details. Prefixing "bio" to a material name conjures a sense of being natural, compostable, and better all round for personal and environmental health.

Marketing narratives surrounding biomaterials are regularly inflated

But these claims can unravel, or at least become complicated, when researching a little deeper than the material classification, product name and strapline. A report from RepRisk found a 70 per cent increase in incidents of greenwashing between 2022 and 2023. Incoming legislation in the EU is specifically targeting this issue.

The definition and terminology around biomaterials is still evolving. For clarity, we're not talking here about biomaterial designed for implanting into the body, but biologically derived materials used in product, fashion and architecture.

Often grown using living micro-organisms like yeast, bacteria, cellulose and mycelium, they can be finely tuned at the nanoscale by engineering DNA sequences to produce specific properties. For example, UK company Colorfix tweaks the DNA of bacteria so that they excrete coloured pigments for dyeing textiles. Microbial manufacturing organisms like these tend to be fed, fermented and modified in controlled environments.

The substitution of fossil-derived, high-carbon materials for biomaterials is urgently important. A recently published study by Radboud Universiteit in the Netherlands concluded that biomaterials reduce greenhouse-gas emissions by an average of 45 per cent compared to fossil-based materials.

But biomaterials are not a magic bullet to the multi-faceted nature crisis industrial civilisation is causing. Especially important is avoiding what are sometimes called "regrettable substitutions" – whereby one material is replaced with another that merely introduces a new set of problems.

For example, BioCane disposable food packaging is an alternative to plastic food packaging made from bagasse – pulped sugarcane-fibre, a waste product from the sugar industry. The design is geared to express its natural origins and circularity, from the subtly flecked, neutral colour and matte finish to the embossed logomark featuring a plant within a gradated circle.

Biomaterials are not a magic bullet to the multi-faceted nature crisis

However, for BioCane to be grease repellant (so it doesn't fall apart before you've consumed the contents) it needs an oleophobic coating, unlike plastic packaging. BioCane uses a polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) for this coating. PFAS are termed "forever chemicals" due to their damaging long-term persistence and accumulation in the environment – not to mention our own bodies.

BioPak, which produces BioCane, transparently publishes information about this on its website, highlighting it as an industry-wide problem. The company also includes a timely pledge to phase out PFAS-containing packaging by June 2024, which happens to coincide with a move to phase out PFAS by the Environmental Protection Agency in the US.

Not all manufacturers are as responsible; it's common to find unlisted additives – or perhaps a fossil-based lamination to improve a material's durability – under a headline claim of biological origins.

Bioplastic is another material experiencing significant growth, partly driven by high oil prices making fossil-fuel-derived plastic less competitive. Most bioplastic is made from ethanol, commonly sourced from corn, wheat or sugarcane. Sugarcane, for example, is planted in monocultures in tropical and sub-tropical countries like Brazil. The sugar is extracted, fermented and distilled to produce precursor chemicals for bioplastics.

But to assess the environmental value of using this bioplastic, we need to know about how the crops are managed – for example, the pesticides and synthetic fertilisers used to increase crop yield, the land-clearance practices, and the effect on food prices if the bioplastic became widely adopted. At the end of the product's life, specialised infrastructure for disposal will need to be in place, further complicating the picture.

Biodegradable bioplastic would seem to offer a solution to the worst ravages of plastic – the alarming buildup of microplastic pollution across the world. How much better if the material could be absorbed back into the environment?

Biodegradable doesn't mean a material will break down in the environment over useful timescales

The market opportunity for biodegradable plastics is alluring, and forecasts predict that they will account for the majority of the bioplastics market – 62 per cent, by 2028. This opportunity is attracting investment and also the potential for greenwashing as companies vie for a competitive advantage over others.

But biodegradable doesn't mean a material will break down in the environment over useful timescales. A 2022 UCL study of supposedly "home compostable" bioplastics revealed that 60 per cent did not fully degrade within the tested timespans – a finding that unravels the whole purpose for investing in compostable packaging.

Claims relating to bioplastics were at the crux of a recent legal case brought against US biotech firm Danimer Scientific Inc. The manufacturer of biodegradable products had claimed that its proprietary plastic material Nodax PHA is able to biodegrade not only in industrial composting facilities but in landfill and in the ocean.

Danimer's share prices rocketed, sparking an investigative report in the Wall Street Journal, which stated that "many claims about Nodax are exaggerated and misleading, according to several experts on biodegradable plastics". Danimer refutes this statement, but what came out in court was that the company performed biodegradability tests on Nodax in a powdered form, which doesn't relate to real-world product formats like bottles that have variable thickness.

The legal case was eventually dismissed, but nonetheless the alleged greenwashing spiked Danimer's share price, shaking investors' trust in the company and having knock-on effects for the wider industry.

Going forward, manufacturers will need to be transparent about what goes into their products. In the EU, legislation tackling greenwashing in product labelling will come into effect in 2026. The new law is a direct response to the rise in misleading claims that companies use.

When specifying a biomaterial, it's important to dig into its provenance

It comes after a study commissioned by the bloc found that 53 per cent of green claims on products and services are vague, misleading or unfounded, and 40 per cent have no supporting evidence. In the UK, the Competition and Markets Authority has published the​​ Green Claims Code – a six-point guide to help businesses ensure they are not unwittingly misleading customers.

These two initiatives highlight the importance of using the right language when promoting products and materials, and as the impact of the EU's legislation ripples through the industry, there will be a natural calibration to more transparency.

The takeaway for designers is that, as ever, the picture is complex. When specifying a biomaterial, it's important to dig into its provenance, as well as to look at the material use and disposal. The allure of the "bio" prefix from an ethical – and marketing – perspective may be strong, but must be taken along with some healthy scrutiny.

Sioban Imms is a colour, material and finish (CMF) and sustainability strategist with a background in design and manufacturing. She is co-founder of consulting agency Substance and a contributing editor at trend forecasters Stylus and WGSN.

The photo, of MarinaTex designed by Lucy Hughes, is courtesy of the University of Sussex.

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The built environment must hark back to its low-carbon past and embrace stone as a structural material if it is to effectively tackle its environmental footprint, writes Steve Webb as part of our Stone Age 2.0 series.

When we look back, ignoring stone will seem like a great missed opportunity. Why did we persist with our high-carbon fossil-fuel building habit when we were surrounded by mountains of ready-made and viable construction material?

We all know we need to reduce construction's carbon impact and to do that we need to wean ourselves off of fossil fuels. The debate over how this can be achieved is wide and confusing and infused with many vested interests. However, building nuclear and renewable power plants while doing nothing to abate the impact of brick, concrete and steel is like having a leaking boat and, instead of plugging the leak, just buying a bigger pump.

The fossil fuel era is a short, 200-year blip in thousands of years of building history. The energy we use to build a single building today is greatly exaggerated compared to any era before. We are so deeply steeped in fossil fuel that we are completely blind to the fact that most of the building materials we use are not only very high energy, and therefore carbon intensive, but often based on coal – a dirty polluting fuel we imagined was on the decline.

To reverse our recent habits, we need to learn from our low-carbon past, while not returning to it. Can we imagine how building technology might have developed from the pre-fossil fuel era to today in the absence of fossil fuels?

Stone can be 15 times less carbon intensive than steel

Stone hails from this low-carbon era but has been largely forgotten by the construction industry in all but cladding and decoration. The material is well-placed for a comeback as its basic attributes compare well against industrial materials.

Stone is non-combustible, incredibly durable and so abundant as to be effectively inexhaustible. Many stones have compressive strengths as high as 200 Newtons per millimetre square, while concrete typically has a strength of 40 Newtons per millimetre square. Granites can be almost double the stiffness of concrete as concrete shrinks and creeps as it dries.

Perhaps most importantly in our current context, stone has a carbon per kilogram of approximately 2.5 times less than concrete. When combined with its superior strength, stone can be 15 times less carbon intensive than steel and 10 times less carbon intensive than concrete. Perhaps surprisingly, stone has even less carbon than timber – when you ignore sequestration, which is itself pretty contentious.

However, carbon isn't the only environmental impact. What about quarrying I hear you ask? While quarrying is impactful, it can be electrified with low levels of power and it can be non-polluting and create only inert waste. Quarries can be left as nature reserves or backfilled with waste. And, when all is said and done, all current building materials are quarried anyway.

While the in-built qualities of stone remain the same as they have for millennia, in the past, stone was used in compression structures, but vaults and flying buttresses are not very practical or space-efficient.

For the 21st century, we need to bring stone up to date – capturing all its goodness, while making it practical for modern constructions. One sensible way to unfetter stone from its gothic past is by reinforcing it as concrete is reinforced.

Stone can be easily drilled and threaded with steel rods making it into beams. The rods can be tensioned using jacks holding the stones together. Stone beams and slabs can be similar in size to steel and concrete ones and achieve similar spans.

This is what we have been working on including our prototype stone beam made for the Building Centre's New Stone Age exhibition in collaboration with the Stone Masonry Company and architecture studio Groupwork. The beam spanned 12 metres and was designed to carry a full office design load.

The beams are 400 millimetres deep and the slabs are 75 millimetres. The system can achieve one-hour fire performance and the unit can be prefabricated and craned into place. Any kind of beam or frame can be made in this way. A further example is the equanimity stone beam exhibited at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in 2022, where a 5.5-metre cantilever beam was formed with Portland stone and recycled granite cladding.

Architectural language should reflect local conditions

The capital investment required to make a switch away from steel or concrete to stone is very little. We have ample stone in the UK. Beam factories like the Stone Masonry Company require little plant and investment and could be set up alongside quarries supplying beams and slabs to order.

Stone makes sense, but is not a silver bullet and should not be thought of in isolation. According to architect Carles Oliver, a return to stone reflects the idea that architectural language should reflect local conditions. In Britain, we are slowly adopting imported mass timber as a low-carbon alternative to mainstream materials without asking whether this creates a natural architectural language for the UK. What would be a language for us?

The UK has limited supplies of local timber, but also has some stone. We have been examining hybrid combinations of timber joists and stone. A private home we worked on in Primrose Hill with Nagan Johnson was an early test of this idea. It has post-tensioned stone beams in combination with timber joists and thin stone slabs. This system, not quite timber and not quite stone, not quite north and not quite south, is less combustible than mass timber and provides just about enough thermal mass to cool spaces in Britain's not-quite-hot summers.

In this system, the long spans were achieved with post-tensioned stone beams where the floor decks in between are formed with hybrid timber and stone composites. Here, the stone acts in compression on top of the floor while the timber takes the tension below it.

Although a modest first step, this system has wide applicability for both housing and commercial uses. Imagine high-rise reinforced stone frames with hybrid timers and stone floors. Not only low carbon but an elegant exposed natural material palette.

Designers need to grow a far more visceral awareness

The government could lead by providing subsidies for research, codification in the form of a structural stone Eurocode and building regulations and stone supply standards.

The private sector also has a role to play but also a commercial opportunity. As recognition of the embodied carbon issue rises amongst investors and, therefore, funders seek ethical investments, and carbon tax starts to increase the cost of high-energy alternatives, there is a huge opportunity for companies to develop products and services using stone or stone and timber hybrids.

Designers need to grow a far more visceral awareness of the energy in high-carbon building materials and push to use less of them in favour of a lower-carbon palette. If these things happen we could get to the point where building is extremely low-carbon and even, if we believe in sequestration, carbon negative and a force for good once again.

Steve Webb is a structural engineer and co-founder of Webb Yates, which he established with Andy Yates in 2005. Webb specialises in non-conventional materials, such as stone, and how they can be used to create low-carbon and environmentally friendly structures. 

The photo of 15 Clerkenwell Close, for which Webb Yates served as structural engineer, is by Timothy Soar.

Stone Age 2.0

This article is part of Dezeen's Stone Age 2.0 series, which explores the potential of stone to be a viable, low-carbon, modern structural material.

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Recently unveiled proposals to build America's tallest skyscraper in Oklahoma City represent an outdated way of thinking about cities' cultural status, writes Ryan Scavnicky.

The 20th-century American metropolis is failing in the 21st. Cities that once welcomed flocks of working-class citizens and immigrants are now playgrounds for wealthy oligarchs and real-estate moguls. Streets covered in unique family businesses from all parts of the world are now thickly encrusted with contrived food experiences and milquetoast fusion concepts (the recent loss of Suehiro in Los Angeles to a marijuana dispensary comes to mind).

The United States' largest cities have all but completely priced out middle-class life. A new study by the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies found that the number of "cost-burdened" renting households – people who spend more than 30 percent of their income on housing – hit a record 22.4 million in 2022, up 2 million from just three years before. Meaning half of all renters struggle to afford rent. We desperately need more affordable housing, and our largest cities are seemingly incapable of keeping up.

The plan has critics and neophytes alike scratching their heads

Enter the planned Boardwalk at Bricktown development in plucky Oklahoma City (OKC), which recently hit the headlines after the site's owners unveiled shocking plans to include the tallest building in the United States. In addition to a hotel and almost 2,000 residential units, the development includes Legends Tower, a 581-metre-tall high rise poised to become the fifth-tallest in the world.

The plan has critics and neophytes alike scratching their heads, and rightly so. Why in the world is this a good idea for Oklahoma City, a place certainly not in desperate need of a new skyscraper? And, hey, what about tornadoes? Searching for answers leads beyond the particulars of the design to find crucial insight into the state of the American metropolis.

First, the architecture offers little design merit. The tower itself is handsome; it has clean vertical edges with a slight taper towards the top, completed by a soaring antenna spire. But beyond that, a proposed podium mall is a jarring collision of materials under a flowing canopy which neither matches nor compliments the anchoring fountain.

I generally like quirky discordant mall urbanism, and this isn't that – it's a spineless copy of Galaxy Soho in Beijing. The middle towers have connecting banded walkways and vertical openings which introduce further visual themes into the already overwrought composition.

Nevertheless, some cities in Middle America are adding housing directly to the central business districts with success, like Austin, Cleveland, and Columbus. And while Legends Tower is unnecessarily tall, the surrounding towers, public space, community and affordable housing, and overall connectedness to the surrounding central business district are promising.

The project connects a river walk and the downtown core by filling a currently empty surface parking lot. It is near a streetcar and an Amtrak station with trains to Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. It also offers some public space, but keep in mind the Boardwalk at Bricktown development isn't truly public, it's what I like to call "mall cop" space, meaning it will be vaguely policed, and have its own set of rules it can enforce, like Hudson Yards in New York City.

The proposal for Legends Tower sends the wrong message

Mid-size cities like OKC are in a better position than ever before to create an attractive environment for those who are either priced out or burned out of life in yesterday's metropolis. As the world changes after a global pandemic and rise of remote work, the cultural benefits of living directly in a major core are wearing thin. No wonder major cities have not yet rebounded from population loss during 2020 and 2021.

Yet, the proposal for Legends Tower sends the wrong message. The 20th-century American metropolis is the physical manifestation of the inequalities of the capitalist economy – most represented by the proximity of poverty to soaring office towers – all wrapped in the paradoxical and often dystopian promise of ever-expanding growth. Before mass media changed cultural production, the prevailing notion was that the city with the tallest tower must have the most cultural and economic importance.

Clearly, Legends Tower is trying to do just that. But realistically it would be silly to think a tall tower in and of itself will push OKC to cultural prevalence in the 21st century, or convince anyone to move there from LA.

This means Legends Tower is a very 20th-century way to say that you are squarely entering the 21st century of cultural and economic change. Instead, Oklahoma City might do better to chop the single tower into five sections and place them in the immediate vicinity. It could establish a wide grassroots buy-in to small, dense and affordable revitalization projects along established transit corridors. Culture comes with that.

Hopefully the Boardwalk at Bricktown development reinforces interest in adding density to the region, which has grown since 2022 zoning legislation legalized accessory dwelling units and four-plex duplexes in single-family residential sections. OKC needs a new icon, and Legends Tower is at the very least a symbol that confirms mid-size cities have the nerve to imagine a physical and cultural resurgence amidst the stagnation of the 20th-century American metropolis.

Oh, and don't worry about tornadoes. We have building codes for a reason.

Ryan Scavnicky is an architect, educator and critic. He is an assistant professor at the School of Architecture at Marywood University and the founder of architecture-related media practice Extra Office.

The image is courtesy of AO.

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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.

Dezeen In Depth
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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.

Dezeen In Depth

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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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If you enjoy reading Dezeen's interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.

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.

Dezeen In Depth

If you enjoy reading Dezeen's interviews, opinions and features, subscribe to Dezeen In Depth. Sent on the last Friday of each month, this newsletter provides a single place to read about the design and architecture stories behind the headlines.

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