dc.description.abstract
The human and the urban: the role of the Architect: yesterday - today - tomorrow Our direct living, working and leisure environment, whether in the city or in more dispersed rural areas, should be organized more locally. On the one hand, this is necessary to become climate-neutral, but the pandemic has also shown us how necessary it is to provide the essential supply facilities as well as open spaces in the immediate vicinity. What local means in the respective context must be examined on a site-specific basis. In general, this should be organized within polycentric systems that complement and complete each other and consider the city and hinterland as parts of an interdependent (eco) system. " As architects, we are not artists, we don't paint pictures that don't care whether someone likes them or not. Architecture is something that people experience or enjoy."1 David Chipperfield points to a certain "operational blindness " of our profession, which should keep the focus on where and for whom it plans and builds, and should be fundamentally aware that everything that surrounds us, systems as well as laws, has either arisen from nature or been created by humans. “All systems within which we live have been designed. The shortcomings of those systems result from defective design…”2 We need to focus much more on these systems in which we live, plan and build. The interfaces between people and their built environment are therefore essential. In our global, multicultural world, the city must offer a variety of spaces that meet the different requirements of (urban) spaces, living, working, educational and leisure environments. Adaptable and dynamic places are needed, but also niches for a wide variety of players and user groups: Places of varying identity and intensity, atmosphere and quality that invite people to explore, conquer, meet, develop, retreat and "be". As architects and urban planners, we must be aware of this responsibility and we must fulfil the needs of the stakeholders in this organism or system. Fundamentally, the model of thinking to be pursued is therefore a humanistic interest in the diversity of realities, places, cultures and identities, based on a holistic approach in which experts from a wide range of disciplines work together to find innovative and unpredictable solutions to the complex challenges of the rapidly growing urban environment and taking care of the natural systems wherein we are just one part of a much bigger ecosystem. We should play a leading role in society more than any other group, look beyond the interests of our clients and individual issues and serve society as public intellectuals and designers . Who else can and must deal with economics and biology, human collectives and geometries, ethics and politics, history and matter? As generalists, informed about everything, but nowhere experts, we are constantly moving at these countless interfaces, connecting, integration, communicating, stimulating. This is precisely the expertise of our profession, creating the " in-between". At the service of society, we bridge the gaps and allow divergent interests, ideas and needs to merge into one integrated design.
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