The World as an Architectural Project

by Hashim Sarkis, Roi Salgueiro Barrio, Gabriel Kozlowski

Architects imagine the fifty speculative world-scale projects from Patrick Geddes, Alison and Peter Smithson, Kiyonori Kikutake, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Luc Deleu, and others.  The world's growing vulnerability to planet-sized risks invites action on a global scale.  The World as an Architectural Project  shows how for more than a century architects have imagined the future of the planet through world-scale projects. With fifty speculative projects by Patrick Geddes, Alison and Peter Smithson, Kiyonori Kikutake, Saverio Muratori, Takis Zenetos, Sergio Bernardes, Juan Navarro Baldeweg, Luc Deleu, and many others, documented in text and images, this ambitious and wide-ranging book is the first compilation of its kind. Interestingly, architects begin to address the world as a project long before the advent of contemporary globalism and its assorted anxieties. The Spanish urban theorist and entrepreneur Arturo Soria y Mata, for example, in 1882 envisions a system that connects the entire planet in a linear urban network. In 1927, Buckminster Fuller's “World Town Plan—4D Tower” proposes to solve global housing problems with mobile structures delivered and installed by a Zeppelin. And Joyce Hsiang and Bimal Mendis visualize the conditions of a worldwide “City of Seven Billion” in a 2015–2019 project. Rather than indulging the cliché of the megalomaniac architect, this volume presents a discipline reflecting on its own responsibilities.

Genres: Architecture, Design

576 pages, Hardcover

Published March 17, 2020

About the author

Hashim Sarkis is Aga Khan Professor of Landscape Architecture and Urbanism in Muslim Societies at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Reviews

[Benji · Rating 3 out of 5]

'Today the proliferation of data privileges a managerial approach to social organization that architecture as a discipline needs to critically address. In the future, data will be a constitutive part of society that needs to be harvested inclusively and openly, relying on architectural thinking and metaphors to be legible. Every piece of information matters in this new world. Every individual matters as a source and consumer of information. To build egalitarian and coherent worlds from this open source of information without compromising its specificity and diversity will be one of the most challenging and promising undertakings for architecture.'