The latest instalment of our series of AR Reading Lists: seven carefully chosen pieces from our archive, free for registered users
In his contribution to our September 2020 issue on Letters to a young architect, Davide Tommaso Ferrando asked ‘how young is young?’ The young architect is defined simply as not an old architect, the line between the two drawn late in an industry that has a tendency to push retirement out beyond the grave.
Neatly split into factions, the language we use around youth and emergence in architecture then threatens to limit that camp, enforce a ceiling over the practices it describes: radical thinking waved away as the idealism of the young. Under such a dichotomy, to be taken seriously, to gain more ‘substantial’ projects and get a shot at making space for yourself, implies that you must first grow up, muddy yourself with the world you want to change.
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Tomorrow’s world: nurturing young talent and voices, Lesley Lokko, AR November 2020
‘We use the word “emerging” to describe conditions that are “in progress”, “en route” but not yet fully “arrived”. Similar in some ways to the “developed/developing world” dichotomy, it is a condition that is full of promise and potential, yet, in the wrong hands or context, can also be patronising’
Can early acclaim for an architect be a handicap – even the kiss of death?, Peter Buchanan, AR December 2015
‘Besides the expectation of recycling recognisable features of the acclaimed works (prematurely freezing them in the straitjacket of a brand style), the overload of work is especially debilitating in that it denies the architect any time for the reflective thought necessary for deepening and development’
The problem with ‘Young Architecture’, Phineas Harper and Phil Pawlett Jackson, AR March 2015
‘“Young Architecture” makes a virtue of an injustice. The ageist mantle demands a level of knowing self-parody from emerging designers who it smothers as it belittles, imposing low expectations as default’
Davide Tommaso Ferrando: letter to a young architect, Davide Tommaso Ferrando, AR September 2020
‘As long as you are a young architect, you are not a full architect yet. You are not talented: you are promising. Your practice is not growing: it is emerging. Your projects are not innovative: they are radical’
Bjarke Ingels: between unbounded optimism and identifiable anxiety, Ian Volner and Julian Rose, AR October 2016
‘Only Ingels could have produced a manifesto that does not seriously reckon with history in any way: the past, one infers, is for dorks. The irony is that Ingels is a supremely talented populariser of someone else’s techne, namely Koolhaas’s, which he has repurposed to more pragmatic ends’
Making an entrance: the next generation of Brazilian architects, Max L Zarzycki, AR October 2019
‘A familiar pall hangs in the air at the mention of political prospects for this generation of architects. Economic and political crisis has caused a regression of policies instated during redemocratisation, intended to mitigate the radical inequalities that beset the region’
Coming of age in Japan’s lost decades: a season of stalwart seedlings, Ken Tadashi Oshima, AR December 2011
‘In this age of uncertainty, this generation has looked beyond conventional corporate positions to a greater diversity of types and scales of basic design possibilities that often use humble materials and methods and encompass furniture/industrial design and landscape’
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