It’s time to rethink the entire role and language of architecture | Cities | The Guardian
▻http://www.theguardian.com/cities/2015/nov/20/rethink-role-language-architecture-alejandro-aravena
As architects, we are living at a time of shifting paradigms. In the past, the scale of our designs grew large, but how many people were we really engaging with? Today, we understand better the sheer complexity of the issues at play when we design and plan buildings, neighbourhoods and even entire cities – and this demands a new, more open approach.
It’s why I’m so interested in how architects and urban planners engage with other fields – economics, security, the environment and so on. Our challenge must be to go beyond architecture and speak the languages of these other disciplines, before translating our discussions into formal design proposals. One of the biggest problems is bad information – well, architects have a responsibility to engage in broad conversations that ensure we are properly informed about all the parameters of a given project. Our ultimate focus is still on form, but what informs this has expanded dramatically.