2015 — 2020
1. HISTORY IN THE MAKING
The September 2016 opening of the National Museum of African American History & Culture on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was a momentous occasion one hundred years in the making. Architect David Adjaye (as part of Freelon Adjaye Bond/smithgroup) delivered a building literally wrought from a troubled history: Its bold bronze-coloured wrapping pays homage to the intricate ironwork crafted by enslaved African–americans in Louisiana, South Carolina and elsewhere.
2. SHRINKING GLACIERS
Olafur Eliasson’s Ice Watch, a recurring installation comprising 12 large blocks of ice cast off from the Greenland ice sheet and harvested from a fjord, brought people right up against the Earth’s melting glaciers, it took over Place du Panthéon during the 2015 Paris Climate Change Conference and Tate Modern in London in 2018, where it was photographed by Charlie Forgham-bailey.
3. “THEY LET YOU DO IT”
Four years later, it’s still hard to come to terms with the election-night results of November 8, 2016. Reality TV star and real estate magnate Donald Trump bested Hillary Clinton to become the 45th POTUS, even after the release of his tape-recorded comments condoning sexual assault — captured in this illustration by Lennart Gäbel, which became an icon of the Women’s Marches that followed. Trump has since unleashed much chaos into the world, wielding a wrecking ball for the ages. He has also riled up the realm of architecture with his border wall construction and his proposed “Making Federal
Buildings Beautiful Again” mandate.
4 AND 5. LOCAL GLOBALISM
In 2018, when the award was given to Balkrishna
Doshi — the Indian architect who, over his more than 60 year career, has created some of the most vibrant low-cost housing ever built — the bestowers of the Pritzker Architecture Prize continued their latter-year focus on honouring architects working in the vernacular, prioritizing local materials and for the needs of local communities.
6. INDIGENOUS ARCHITECTURE RISES
Spurred in part by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada’s Calls to Action, the global ascent of Indigenous designers has moved discussions of
inclusion beyond land acknowledgements. Douglas Cardinal’s representation of Canada at the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale and artist Tanya Lukin Linklater’s collaboration with architect Tiffany Shaw-collinge at the third Chicago Architecture Biennial were among the many projects that engaged traditional knowledge to help unpack, brick by brick, the settler-colonial project.
7. PLASTICS, RECYCLED
In 2019, the design world made a big statement about the use of plastics in furniture manufacturing as many manufacturers, including Kartell (whose Philippe Starck– designed A.I. chair, shown, is made from recycled polymer), Humanscale and Emeco launched series made from upcycled material or bio-based varieties. The gist: it’s time to commit to diverting the vast amount of existing plastics away from landfills and into factories.
8 AND 9. POT LUCK
Since Uruguay became the first country to legalize the recreational consumption of marijuana in 2013, many others have begun to decriminalize or legalize the use of cannabis for medicinal or recreational use (Canada was second, in 2018). An unsurprising side effect? Cannabis has become a major industry — and the design world is exploiting the opportunity, crafting everything from accoutrements that are more collectible design than counterculture paraphernalia (see the solid brass F8 Liv grinder by Blok Design for 48North, shown) to retail interiors that look more art gallery than seedy head shop (like Kolab Project’s Saskatchewan flagship by Toronto’s Emil Teleki, shown).
10. MANHATTAN PROJECT
Heatherwick Studio. Diller Scofidio + Renfro. Bjarke Ingels Group. A who’s who of renowned architects has converged to design the largest ongoing private real estate project in the U.S. Situated atop a sprawling Manhattan railway yard and boasting offices, shops, restaurants, residences and cultural space, Hudson Yards sets a luxurious benchmark for a new era of investmentdriven masterplanned development. The result? An architectural spectacle — and a sterile district dismissed as “a billionaire’s fantasy city” by New York magazine.
2015 — 2020
11. KEEPING IT REAL
In response to the saturation of glossy renderings, architectural representation made a distinct shift beyond the computer in the past decade. Whether returning to hand drawing or incorporating collage, architects like Pezo von Ellrichshausen (whose illustration is shown here), Sam Jacob and Tatiana Bilbao have opted for conceptualism over realism in their analogue and digital works, reminding us that these images are not windows but ways of seeing the possibilities of a future yet to be built.
12. APP RESPONSE
The negative effects of city-transforming apps like Airbnb and Uber truly emerged as the online rental marketplace began to strip major urban centres of affordable housing units and ride-sharing services began to clog these same urban centres with more and more vehicles. Shown: an Airbnb-only suite at 62M, a flying saucer–shaped condo building in Winnipeg by 5468796 Architecture (photo by James Brittain).
13. AFROFUTURISM LOOKS FORWARD
Janelle Monáe’s Archandroid. The technological marvels of Black Panther’s Wakanda. Sculptor Nick Cave’s vibrant Soundsuits. Deftly combining themes drawn from science fiction with the experiences of the African diaspora, Afrofuturism took hold of music, film, fashion and visual culture as increased diversity and representation echoed across disciplines. With cyborg aesthetics, metallic parts and more, these creatives are revisiting the past to critique the anti-black sentiments permeating the present, all while offering a striking vision of a distinctly Blackcentric world to come. Shown: a still from Black Panther, for which Hannah Beachler won an Academy Award for Best Production Design in 2019.
14. BLOWING BUBBLES
As it is in Manhattan, starchitecture is still the name of the game in Vancouver, where developer Westbank has commissioned the likes of Bjarke Ingels and Kengo Kuma to design high-rise condos. But who can afford to live in them? As development far outpaces affordability, B.C. has enacted Bill 28, which introduces a vacancy tax and a foreign-buyers tax to curb an investor-driven real estate bubble.
2020 + 1. THE CLIMATE EMERGENCY
At the beginning of the new decade, harrowing scenes of Australia’s wildfires set off alarms around the world. While they wrought destruction, forced mass displacement, claimed dozens of lives and affected hundreds of already threatened species, the uncontrolled bushfires also spewed 306 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. This ecological disaster came on the heels of California’s uncontrolled wildfires of 2019. How much clearer a message do we need that climate change is a global crisis requiring our immediate and sustained attention? The art and architecture communities have released manifestos — such as “Architects Declare” and the Tate Museum’s “Climate Emergency Declaration” — while grassroots activists such as
Extinction Rebellion and the Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg are fighting to keep the issue front and centre. But we are confronted daily with evidence that we aren’t doing nearly enough. And yet, now is the time to act: to protect our natural habitats, to build more efficiently and make our cities less car-dependent, to invest in carbon-fighting technologies and to bolster the social safety net so that we can meet the uncertain future with more resilience.
2 AND 3. DOWN TO EARTH
Glass and steel skyscrapers will continue to rise and architects will continue to speculate about building on Mars, but we’ll also be seeing a return to the earthiest of materials. Representing a yearning for the local and essential — and for warmth and comfort — terracotta finishes and mud bricks will have an enduring appeal as the decade continues. In architecture, this trend is epitomized by projects like Marc Thorpe’s proposal for Senegal’s Dakar Houses, a series of earth-brick residences (shown) for the craftspeople of Moroso’s ongoing M’afrique line of furnishings. In the design realm, it’s also at the heart of the terracotta trend, exemplified by Giulio Iacchetti’s elemental Mira vase series (shown) for Giuseppe Mazzotti 1903.
2020 +
4. SMALL TOWNS, BIG PLANS
Utopia revived? Some 60 kilometres north of Toronto, the semi-rural town of Innisfil is an unlikely site for revolutionary design, but that’s just what architects Partisans have in mind. Dubbed “The Orbit,” the Innisfil master plan (depicted in a rendering by Norm Li) envisions a new urban centre orbited by concentric rings of smaller buildings that gradually meld with the pastoral landscape — complete with AI infrastructure and a fibreoptic streetscape: the Garden City meets Burning Man in Ontario.
5. THE SPECTRE OF FACIAL RECOGNITION
The future is already here; it’s just not evenly distributed. At the Shenzhen biennale, an exhibition called “The Eyes of the City” incorporated a facial recognition feature that visitors could opt out of. According to Politecnico di Torino’s Michele Bonino, who curated the exhibition with Carlo Ratti Associati, many did just that. The surveillance technology already exists in many Chinese cities in a form that cannot be avoided — unless you’re wearing a medical mask. As the COVID-19 virus tore through China, the biennale was temporarily shut down, lending the entire exercise a meta significance. Meanwhile, the spectre of Ai-enabled facial recognition is slowly creeping into public and commercial spaces from airports to malls around the world.
6. FROM CO-WORKING TO CO-LIVING
Just as Wework was beginning to unravel, the realm of co-working began to morph into the future of co-living. The prevailing notion is that we’re all going to be roomies one day, sharing common amenities like kitchens and living rooms in dorm-like settings that maximize our creativity and productivity while adding yet another option to our housing-deficient cities. (Shown: futuristic visualizations by Ikea’s Space10 think tank.)
7. ELON MUSK’S BRAIN CHIP
One of the most prominent voices warning of the threat posed by artificial intelligence, Elon Musk seems to have have done a 180. The Tesla founder is betting big on Neuralink, a technology that utilizes brain-reading threads, inserted by a robot, to render humans more symbiotic with AI.
8. THE SMART CITY IS A FOREST
Since realizing his Bosco Verticale towers in Milan,
Stefano Boeri has gone on to produce visions that make plant life integral to entire cities. The Smart Forest City master plan he’s created for Cancun, Mexico — on 557 hectares originally destined for a shopping district — is the latest example of the architect’s ambition to re-nature the urban realm. The city (shown in a rendering by The Big Picture) would abound with 7.5 million plants, 260,000 of them trees, which together would absorb 116,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.
9. TIMBER!!!
As recently as a decade ago, skyscrapers made of wood seemed like an ecological pipe dream. Today, however, tall timber towers are being planned and erected from Toronto (where they’re a cornerstone of Alphabet’s ambitious Quayside smart ’hood) to Tokyo (the planned site of the planet’s tallest). France has just decreed that, starting in 2022, all new public buildings must contain at least 50 per cent wood or other organic materials. However tall those Gallic structures turn out to be, one thing is clear: For mass timber, the sky’s the limit.
10. REVISITING THE COUNTRYSIDE
Rem Koolhaas explores the immense divide between urban and rural in his blockbuster (and polarizing) exhibition at New York’s Guggenheim, a main focus being the sprawling infrastructure that exists far removed from the booming metropolises that once captivated him. Formerly bucolic expanses, these locales have been tranformed by a variety of natural, economic and political factors into contested terrains where the technological forces shaping our collective future play out.
11. NEVER DEMOLISH
“The greenest building is the one that is already built.” Former AIA president Carl Elefante’s dictum encapsulates the evolution of sustainable architecture. Focusing on the embodied carbon costs of construction, the movement to “never demolish” is the new vanguard of green building. From Lacaton & Vassal’s refurbishment of midcentury Bordeaux apartment blocks to Civic Architects’ transformation of a locomotive shed into a public library (shown) in the Dutch city of Tilburg, old buildings are the locus of new design thinking.