A New Book Points to Unconventional Ways that Architecture Shapes Society

Lately, everyone seems to be dreaming of building a better “future”—a post-COVID future free of abusive power structures and rooted in decolonization, equity, and environmental protection. What role can architecture play in making all of this happen? A new Phaidon book by New York–based critic and curator Beatrice Galilee highlights more than 75 innovative projects that model how the built environment shapes social and political change.

Through five themed chapters, Radical Architecture of the Future advocates a cross-disciplinary approach to architecture and highlights “ways in which architecture contributes to society without building,” whether through performance, VR, game design, or other media. Flipping through the volume, readers will glimpse conventional projects—David Adjaye’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (right) or Francis Kéré’s eucalyptus-clad Lycée Schorge school in Burkina Faso, for example—alongside film stills from Black Panther and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s portraits of families in Flint, Michigan, as they contend with a drinking-water crisis.

While Galilee points to architecture’s direct contribution to the current “ecological catastrophe,” and its role in upholding an “unjust social order of white male privilege,” she selected works that also demonstrate the profession’s evolution to include diverse voices and methodologies. She writes: “One thing that became clear is that the terms under which architecture exists today—permanent, patriarchal, capitalistic, and upholding a Western canon—have changed.”

You may also enjoy “A New Book Explores the Iterative Nature of Milton Glaser’s Designs”

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to: [email protected]

Register here for Metropolis’s Think Tank Thursdays and hear what leading firms across North America are thinking and working on today.