Domus 1050 is on newsstands: “Will technology save us?”

The discipline of architecture and the ever-changing world of technology continue to intersect in a complex way, redefining the boundaries of the profession. In October’s editorial, Domus 1050, guest editor David Chipperfield questions the role of architects and designers in engaging technologies towards broader responsibilities.

In exploring Reyner Banham’s last writings on the High Tech movement, Todd Gannon uncovers the critic’s prescient observations on its paradoxes as both visual style and system. Despite Banham’s devotion to functional performance, “he more often pulled back when technology threatened to dissolve architecture altogether” and would likely have upheld the profession’s critical role today.

Helen Thomas considers the once unquestioned acceptance of International Modernism’s technologies as a guiding principle of advancement for the developing countries of the “Islamic world”, and the reactions against it as a form of cultural intrusion in the postcolonial context. Reframing the use of vernacular building technologies from an environmental and social sustainability perspective further reinforces the need to openly re-examine conventional currents of knowledge transfer.

Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani cautions against the blind pursuit of technology as the defining component of our physical environments. While it now plays an indispensable role in our lives, the city has a long history of resisting the intrusion of technology on its form, which must continue to be shaped by the “world of people”.

Taking as a reference the modest and experimental Arcadia Education Project, Saif Ul Haque reflects on the adequacy of simple but innovative solutions, implemented respecting constraints, but aiming to make them become models that will take us to the future.

In the nineties there was so much to fight for. High-tech, Deconstructivism, Neomodernism.  Adam Curuso tells us about the research carried out by his studio together with his ETH students on the most ideological and programmatic promises of Modernism, driven by the evident inability of architecture to deal with the imbalances of contemporary life.

Alireza Taghaboni, after 20 years of continuous involvement in architectural issues, explains how the Iranian conception of architecture should be read through her relationship with three 'other' entities: the Government, the market and the West.

Michael Murphy and Alan Ricks of MASS Design Group show us the three fundamental principles that guide them in their professional practice: investing in our planet, safeguarding it from the destruction of the environment and restoring its natural functions, making sense of places for those who live there and, finally, awakening the bonds that inextricably connect us to one another.

Inspired by Japan’s ancient mythology, Kazuko Koike sees design as “a kind of performance” that shines light into the world. By focusing on the connections between verbs and objects as the fundamental process, she reminds us of the important sense of fulfilment to be found in both the making of an object and its use. A vision that is both poetic and pragmatic, the author sees this contentment embodied in a 17th-century Japanese painting depicting a scene of family life.

Jasper Morrison’s investigation of design has a very personal slant this month, with the designer retracing significant stages in his 40-year relationship with Milan, the city that opened his “first door to the world of design” with a Salone del Mobile. To him, it “represented the cutting edge of the design market, as it still does today”. This journey takes us back to 1984, rich in anecdotes and encounters, and illustrated by photos taken by Morrison himself. The second part will appear in the November issue.

Taking our interdisciplinary explorations a step further, this month we visit the Armadillo House, a private building project created collaboratively between an architect and an artist: Roger Diener, whose work often fuses the two disciplines, and Marc Camille Chaimowicz, whose career has endlessly explored the ephemeral objects and surfaces of the domestic realm. Together they have created a Gesamtkunstwerk with a playful subversive tension between structure and decoration.

An emergency solution suggested by the site foreman to make drawings last in hostile monsoon conditions has become common practice at Studio Mumbai. For nine
years now, the team has been using adhesive tape and plywood sheets to “draw” construction details to be shared effectively with those working on site.

The need to evolve design communication is explored further in “Making architecture” this month, where we look at participatory design. Roel De Ridder, Mela Zuljevic e Liesbeth Huybrechts trace the evolution of attitudes and approaches in this way of understanding the profession, and explain why technology plays an important role
in fostering civic engagement today.

For “Place matters”, Ben Lerner reflects on the transformation of architecture into nature, interior into exterior, and the security of the home through the books he has been reading to his children during the pandemic.

Delving into the Domus archives, and returning to our “Agenda” topic of technology, Fulvio Irace re-examines the paradoxes Rogers’s Lloyd’s building, seen as “a ‘monument’ to the last heroic age of militant modernism”, even though it actually owed its status to the expressive force of the architecture that Banham had pilloried.

The promise of a smart home and a reality that is always connected is just a few steps away. We are getting used to doing the shopping in the dentist’s waiting room, spying inside the fridge at home to check what’s left in stock; we listen to the latest news by interacting with the air purifier, set alarm clocks that simultaneously open all the shutters around the house and maybe even open the garage door at the same time to let the dog out, while wireless earphones are becoming an extension of our own bodies, endowed with artificial intelligence that no longer just repeat sounds and adjusts the volume to suit external circumstances but that can even translate the words we hear in real time. If up until now intelligent solutions for the smart home appeared to follow the evolution of the habits of home life, technological evolution is now so disruptive that it seems to be setting out new habits and lifestyles.

The library, pictured in Thomas Demand’s cover for this issue, is designed as an upwardly expanding spiral, its louvred outer skin evoking the riffled pages of a book. In this way, the interior of the book stands for the building’s exterior, and Demand’s refabrication of the facade in paper returns the building to its original reference,  the Meles Zenawi Memorial Park by Studio Other Space.