B11/24 | Caruso St John - kuratierte Ausgabe

Im November erscheint unser großes Curated-Heft 2024!
Die Kuratoren in diesem Jahr: Caruso St John Architects aus London. Sowohl Adam Caruso als auch Peter St John lehren an der ETH Zürich und an der Londoner Metropolitan University. Es ist ihnen ein Anliegen, ihr umfassendes theoretisches Wissen weiterzutragen – mit keinem geringeren Ziel, als die notwendigen Veränderungen, denen sich die Architektur jetzt stellen muss, mit anzustoßen.

A Baumeister Reader

The architectural project shifts every decade or so, the productive turn of the 1950s gives way to the social in the 1960s and 70s, and the formal in the 1980s and 90s. Each change is a reaction to what came before it, and is a response to the present. A few good ideas and buildings come out of each epoch, and  much emerges that is of less interest and quality. The last thirty years have seen an unprecedented production of building at a global scale, as architects have aligned their practices ever closer to the economies of extraction. I believe that the only response to this outpouring of resources, at least in the west, is to stop new building. The new turn will be one of circularity. This new paradigm has enormous potential for architecture, but to engage with these new possibilities we will have to develop new ways of seeing the world and new capacities within our metier. In the early 1970s work of artists like Robert Smithson and Hilla and Bernd Becher, a delicacy as well as a sense of the sublime is revealed in the sites and processes of late western industry. Contemporary architecture needs to develop comparable sensitivities to the residue of late capitalism to find new kinds of beauty so that we fall in love with what today we disparage; new forms of knowledge that enable us to mobilise the material that we presently discard. References to existing architecture have to be expanded to include a much wider sense of the social and the material, in existing situations. We are being presented with an opportunity to engage in a much wider and more substantial way with the world around us.

The contents of this Baumeister Reader touch on different aspects of the challenges that lie ahead for our discipline. Some of the texts are explicitly about architecture while others are more historical and talk around the subject. Some are texts that I read many years ago and have long been part of discussions in the office and my teaching, others I only discovered recently. To be sure, this list is partial and personal, but it is a starting point and hopefully will motivate the reader to add new and different subjects and ideas to their own, personal readers.

Adam Caruso | Caruso St John