Ecotectonics?; Perspecta 47
Project Team: Can Vu Bui, Vincent Calabro and Ian Starling
Excerpt from essay, published in Perspecta 47:
For architects in search of meaningful influence on the way people live,
the realm of the city has always been a compelling stage for testing
new ideas. While the architecture of global centers of capital has
slipped into a mature stage of generic development, the developing world
is on the brink of an unprecedented era of urbanization: in the next
twenty years 1.3 billion people will migrate to the cities of emerging
countries,1 and in half that time these markets will produce nearly
fifty percent of the expected
global GDP growth.2 These new
populations will be seeking not only jobs but access to health care,
infrastructure, recreation, and other advantages of urban life; it is a
migration that will compress people, resources, and capital. How will
the built environment adapt to such rapid changes, and how can
architects take the lead? While many complex forces will shape this
emerging urban order, the focus will be on two pressures in particular:
finance and energy.
Following years of financial deregulation and growth of secondary markets, the contemporary city has
been
transformed from a fixed place to a liquid asset. Financial instruments
such as Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are augmenting and even
replacing traditional “brick and mortar” investments. The importance of
real capital has diminished greatly as new financial tools subsume it, a
process that has been described as the “financialization” of the
economy; economic performance is tied increasingly to complex financial
systems rather than physical output. Thus, in several sectors of the
built environment, appeal to investors and rate of return have become
the most important aspects of a project’s feasibility. The result is an
imperative for predictable results and an aversion to risk from which
arises a pervasive ethos of genericism heavily restricted by global
industry standards of development and construction. Countless scholars
within and outside of the discipline have noted this trajectory.