Awarded at the Architectural League of NY Young Architects Forum 2009
Architectural League of NY Young Architects Forum website
What matters right now is how to deal with the consequences. Think backwards, recall. Earlier foresights offer a bygone sort of delight: none got closer to this extension of capitalist disaster. Architects’ honeymoon with economic power is over and it is becoming an unfriendly divorce. We are left with its cost: no thrust, overpriced assets to dispose off and a traumatized progeny of users striped from their home ownership. For the time being the State mediates, but the various stimulus packages avoid architecture. In these conditions, we would prefer not to offer conciliatory solutions or moralized futures, nor even dystopian cynicisms. Rather, this portfolio arranges architectural operations in a tripartite array: foreclosures, real estate and credit, which refer as much to their original meaning as to last year economic reorganization, i.e. the dramatic increase of foreclosures, the burst of the real estate bubble and the extreme lack of credit. Nothing but to the conditions in which we operate. In fact, what follows is the map of the opportunities we found under such conditions: alternative forms of domesticity emerged from foreclosures, planning strategies that take advantage of the burst and prevent future real estate bubbles and forms of architectural implementation whose main requirement is to bypass credit agencies. Our humble contribution to the disclosure of the discipline’s future is a set of architectural operations tested against the present conditions. It is for the daring fool or the impudent soothsayer to draw images of the future with such materials.
