Transcription
What is that picture? Architecture is the assemblage and design of stories in space. So I'm interested in the idea that design is really about a set of relationships—be they fictional or real—a set of relationships that create and produce space and objects. I mean, I mean, just in the way that a narrative or a story about the iPhone 10 might produce and create a landscape across the other side of the world in Africa, right? Or a story about a hip new bar produces a moment of gentrification within the sea, or a story of love produces a new house. Right? So if we think about architecture in this way, then really the creation or the telling of stories is actually a critical act of architecture, a critical act of design, a critical act of making space.
So if we think about that idea of architecture as stories, then architects play a really fundamental role in the creation of those stories and, in turn, the creation of cities and the imagination, in the creation of futures. So one fundamental thing that I think architecture can do is prototype possible futures, and I think that's a really important role that the architect has, especially now when we're faced with so many moments of uncertainty—with a financial collapse or ecological disaster. There are so many balls in the air; we're just not sure where they might fall. The idea of the future as a project again is increasingly relevant, right? And we understand who we are, and we understand the world, and we understand our relationship to each other through these stories. And stories produce culture, and culture produces space, and space produces cities. And in this way, when we think about architecture, something that can help us understand the implications of the ways that emerging scenarios, trends, and technologies are actually acting on these spaces and actually producing new kinds of stories. So architecture can help us to understand these complex systems and scenarios, and that understanding can help us to act strategically within those systems.
So the idea that architects can imagine and project trends and scenarios, I think, is really fundamental and important. So within this context of stories and the production of culture, I'm interested in the way that these stories and urban culture is, for the most part, limitless if we understand it in terms of its stretch across the planet. I am interested in the way that everything, in a way, has become urban. We live in a strange kind of city everywhere where technology and design and architecture, in many ways, has remade the world—from the scale of the atom to the scale of the earth, from the pixel to the planet. And as designers and architects, we need to think about intervening and designing within these systems, not by producing singular objects, but by creating work that coalesces like a cloud out of these systems or perhaps sets in motion new relationships within these systems.
And my interest in stories because stories, in a way, can operate like this—you know, stories are cultural objects that can produce profound, profound change, right? Via the narrative of nations or the narrative of going to the moon or to Mars, you know, the narrative of an aspirational future of renewables, or the fiction that technology will save us. You know, all these narratives are things that architects can actually start to sculpt and design and create an inheritance that are really fundamental within this, have context of the planetary city.
So if we think about, you know, one of the things that architects can do as the idea of prototyping possible futures, then that's what I do as part of my architecture and design method. I travel around the world seeking out the weak signals of possible futures and then exaggerating them to see where they might lead—good or bad, positive or negative—in the hope that we may be able to make more informed decisions about how we act in the present, more informed decisions about the futures that we want to have. I'm really interested in this idea, this quote from the science fiction author William Gibson that says that the future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed. And if that really is the case, then it must be possible to travel around the world, identify and occupy those pockets of the future, and document them and report back and to extrapolate from those strange but challenging pockets and to start to imagine the world that might be generated from them. And that's, for the most part, what I do. And I borrow from techniques of fiction, film, and performance to speculate on the implications of those weak signals, to speculate on the possibilities of new technologies, to create works that illuminate a kind of visionary present—this idea that, you know, a really important thing that architects can do is to look at the world as it is, to develop wondrous and speculative ideas about the world that might be coming, but also to explore the pertinent questions that might be challenging us today.