Architecture builds the world, it cannot project with its back to it.
To anticipate the future and respond to new emergencies, you must take risks.
The result can hit or miss, and then become an uncomfortable witness.
That unstable balance between trying to anticipate the needs of tomorrow and being a reminder of past failures makes this discipline a slow art.
The industry that is also works slowly for other reasons.
Contrary to what might be suspected - due to the constant invention of materials and the unstoppable improvement in technological development - the times of architecture are getting longer and longer.
Partly because super-advanced technology or ultra-smart materials aren't always the most appropriate, inexpensive, or available;
partly because of the bureaucracy of regulatory controls and, in a not insignificant part, because we have already learned that what makes many architectural projects more expensive are not only the occurrences, or the miscalculations, of some architects, but also the parallel accounts: the enormous , and often obscure, figures that move construction.
Thus, for a long time now, the game has not only been in the hands of those who design buildings and cities, if it ever was, when client and architect sought the same goal: the legendary immortality.
What happens now?
Is there an architecture of reaction to the great problems that are shaking the planet?
Between building an oxymoron like a permanent field hospital in vain — there is also a cost to maintain what is unnecessary — or providing infrastructure, however rudimentary, to those who need it, there is a world.
The former is incomprehensible from the logic of use, but the logic of corruption is more perverse than that of function.
The second requires that the architect be, in addition to being a designer, a social agent.
Between these two extremes there are necessary ideas of urban recycling, energy conditioning, healing coexistence with what exists and, of course, the sisifico effort to reinvent gunpowder so that the show does not cease.
An always pertinent question is to discover what the real architectural gunpowder is today.
The answer should extend sustainability from energy and material to social.
Beyond a growing global danger that tests our ability to agree and evidence our disagreements, the plague of Covid-19 is a very serious warning about the forms of life, the exploitation of the planet and the priorities of the last decades.
This warning is reflected in the architecture that is already being projected in ephemeral interventions that - as happens during major events - have had an urban scale.
It is an urban planning, in principle temporary, that has given the streets back to the citizens - limiting car traffic - and that some mayors, such as those of Paris or Barcelona, have begun to adopt to permanently transform their cities.
New Swatch headquarters in Biel (Switzerland), from Shigeru Ban.
Didier Boy de la Tour
That spirit of social logic is not new.
He has been present for years in jobs that are little publicized because they are humble or because their construction does not have an economic impact other than in those who barely have it.
Reporting on the coexistence of architectures is an obligation and a wealth.
In the architectural harvest of the coronavirus, as happens after crises, a mixture of self-criticism, good intentions and for each other for himself.
Along with the proposals for citizen reconquest - which also question the priority given to tourism that has emptied urban centers - initiatives to expand the field of architecture emerge, proposals to make it seriously sustainable and also a desire to increase the spectacular nature of the discipline.
Let's start at the end.
In the most striking version of the new architecture, the winner is Rem Koolhaas, in charge of the OMA studio, with the department stores built in Gwanggyo (South Korea), for the Galleria business group.
Morphologically, the building tries to get closer to a rock.
This ambition leaves the viewer wondering if it is a really ugly property - and just surprisingly sinister - or if Koolhaas is once again the one who anticipates what we still cannot understand.
It is not a question - needless to say - of Manicheanly judging a property as beautiful or ugly.
It is about reacting to a first impression justified by the architects from "the lack of visual weight of the neighborhood", a dormitory city without history 25 kilometers from Seoul.
It is true that the triangular stone paneling that surrounds it achieves more expression than the skyscrapers that surround it, but the outer band - which builds a lucid perimeter circulation - ends up wrapping the rock like the ribbon of the bow in a gift.
Considering the perimeter circulations of the Seattle Library or the Doha Library, it is worth considering whether Koolhaas will not be fundamentally good at organizing the patron parade and the rest will play it at high risk: to root the neighborhood, he has landed a meteorite.
Another of the new projects is a framed hole, signed posthumously by Zaha Hadid, which inevitably also surprises with its spectacular shape.
It is in Dubai, a few meters from the tallest skyscraper in the world, the Burj Khalifa.
It's called Opus, it belongs to the Spanish hotel group Meliá and is made up of two towers joined at the base and the crown.
The hole that separates them acts as a patio of lights and allows the security control in the entrances.
Its formal boldness contrasts, however, with the unreasonable decision to build in the desert with a glass facade, the so-called curtain wall.
It is true that this finish makes the building itself disappear among the reflections of its neighbors, but beyond ignoring the
genius loci
, the energy logic makes water and that ends up speaking of the past.
And weighing on the future.
Project to expand homes with recycled bamboo structures by the Mexican Rozana Montiel.
JAIME NAVARRO
The desire to build quickly and the value of intermediate spaces - with advantages from the outside such as natural light and the protection of an interior - are present in the last of the projects inaugurated by the Japanese Shigeru Ban: the Swatch Campus in Biel, Switzerland .
Here, the headquarters of the watchmaking company embraces the Omega factory like a giant earthworm.
It is a very visual project that, however, is an outstanding exercise in innovation.
More or less capricious, the shape is the result of a transforming will: one of the largest buildings made of wood in the world.
The Campus is also Ban's largest project to date and brings to business architecture what his studio has learned working with the emergency.
The roof - made up of 7,700 fir panels - contrasts with the Cartesian volume of the factory, also built with a wooden structure.
However, it is the most willful version of current architecture that is the most revolutionary because it seeks to promote changes that are much more necessary than arbitrary.
Architects such as Mexican Mariana Ordóñez and Jesica Amescua defend discipline as a collaborative process, that is, they design with users.
They work with communities of women identifying urgent needs and proposing constructive and cultural solutions.
They listen, discuss, project and even raise money from the website of their studio, Comunal.
They are not alone in this new version of the architect-social agent.
Like the Shau studio in Indonesia or Anna Heringer in Bangladesh, the Pritzker Shigeru Ban also collects donations for his so-called emergency projects: the temporary houses he teaches how to build after earthquakes, typhoons or - in his own country - nuclear disasters.
Sharing the urgency of what cannot be delayed, again in Mexico, the architects Rozana Montiel and Alin V. Wallach conceived a few months ago the project
A fourth more:
a simple structure of bamboo and recycled aluminum that —with very low cost and less two weeks of construction — expands the houses on its rooftops.
In the line of the incremental dwellings of Alejandro Aravena, it is about placing one house on top of another taking advantage of the existing house as a foundation and using the distance from the ground as protection.
The architects sought to grow the houses effortlessly and avoiding a large financial outlay.
Montiel talks about combating overcrowding.
Also to reduce domestic violence.
In the same way that true writing must teach us to escape, there is an architecture that teaches us to think.
That is why it is unexpected.
We live in a time in which the little is beginning to surprise more than the much.
And if the spectacular architecture is less surprising, what will it have left?
The coronavirus is showing that the necessary sustainability is not just an energy issue.
The
New York Times
has made it a headline: "Help Those Who Have Nothing."
It is not only a matter of social justice, it is a matter of economic survival: without clients, the market, like architecture, ceases to exist.