How the Built Environment Evolves with the Times

One vital way professions change is through the values and concerns that every cohort of new professionals brings with it. METROPOLIS’s Future100, a program now in its fourth year, surfaces the perspectives of the brightest new minds in architecture and interior design. 

“I try to approach projects from the mindset that if I’m in school the project is inherently a conceptual project. I might as well lean into that a bit,” says Axel Olson, a master’s candidate at the University of Michigan’s Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning. His Self-Storage project, for example, conceives of temporary structures as “warehouses” of cast-off construction materials, keeping them in use till they find more permanent homes. This kind of comfort with mutable, changeable purposes for buildings runs through the Future100 portfolios. School of Visual Arts interior design student Meixi Xu reimagines an entire New York neighborhood as an ecosystem where people’s livelihoods and lifestyles change with the buildings they live in—bringing intentionality to the subtle forces that already bind us to buildings. “I’m trying to create something that is not buildable now because what we can build now is not enough,” she says. “I want to create something beyond ‘now.’”

I am excited to see how ideas like these and the dozens of others showcased in this issue’s Future100 stories, all incubated in the classroom, will evolve over many encounters with the construction site in the years to come. Social, political, and economic forces, themselves ever changing, will undoubtedly hone and select the fittest of these to create the built environment of the future. I hope it will be one that we will all be able to live and thrive in. 

Here are all the stories from the Summer 2024 issue: