AR Reading List 041: letters for the new year

Last summer, amid the break in our building studies brought by the pandemic, we took the opportunity to ask architects, academics, critics and more to write a ‘letter to a young architect’. We put many of these together in our September issue; arranged together, they made a frame for thinking through the future of the profession.

As we approach the end of a year of forceful change, the advice given and lessons learned in these letters remain as needed as they were when written. We now present seven as-yet unpublished pieces from the same series: seven letters for the new year. Our entire website remains open to anyone registered with a free account to peruse until 3 January; happy new year, and happy reading!

Kashef Chowdhury: letter to a young architect
‘Think then of our cities and how we made our cities, think too of the lands on which we built them, before we built them’

Elizabeth Grosz: letter to a young architect
‘Architecture builds new worlds, worlds made by us that affect and transform both us and our surrounding milieus. But it is also a specialised profession, primarily directed to clients with money, with financial interests and specific aims and needs’

Nasser Rabbat: letter to a young architect
‘Despite its humanistic roots, architecture is an expression of power: sophisticated, imposing, controlling, and, for a large number of people, out-of-reach’

Mauricio Pezo and Sofia von Ellrichshausen: letter to a young architect
‘at the opposite extreme of a career you felt not only sympathy but also disregard in your somewhat visceral reaction towards emeritus tributes, those deceitful condolences that seem to only accelerate the burial of a mere lifetime collection of discreet experiences. “We should give a medal to time itself”, you always argued’

Carme Pinós: letter to a young architect
‘We must listen to the demands, but our answers must always go beyond these. It is also our responsibility to offer poetics’

Lee Ivett: letter to a young architect
‘So it’s okay to lose, it’s okay to fall short and it’s okay to feel vulnerable. Your role now is to not only acknowledge your own needs but to identify and act upon the needs of others’

Christophe Van Gerrewey: letter to a young architect
‘What Walter Benjamin wrote in the 1930s – “Architecture has never had fallow periods” – remains true, and the most conservative and hopeless world imaginable, is a world to which no architecture, in which form whatsoever, is added’