Even with rising waters, heat waves and brutal weather events – but also with energy wars, supply chain crises and the skyrocketing prices in building materials – architects will still bet nothing will change in their practice. They will resort to every type of excuse before even considering such a move.
The Portuguese architecture scene provides good examples of such a state of affairs. A well-known, Pritzker-awarded architect once famously declared that “good architecture is, by definition, sustainable”. That surely means that, if you consider yourself a “good architect”, you don’t have to do shit about what’s going on. This is the same architect who, in order to have a terrain that would fit his recognised building recipe, used the whole budget of a house to rebuild the site’s landscape, both to the client’s despair and to no known environmental purpose. The metric of the existing rural walls, the reasoning went, was “wrong” for the architectural proportions that this master builder usually deployed. For me, that was the swansong of Portuguese architecture’s acclaimed respect for the idea of place.