Our Legacy

If our society will leave any trace of post-industrial civilization a thousand years from now, it will not be any individual building or monument, or even a factory. Only the ruins of a few infrastructure projects will perhaps survive, thanks to their sheer mass and scale, such as highway, bridges, and dams. The true legacy of our civilization, however, will be the vast craters of open-pit mines in the Rhine valley, the amputated peaks of Appalachia – devastated by mining technique that removes entire mountaintops to extract minerals – and the wasteland left behind by hydraulic fracturing operations in the American west.

The impact of cities on places elsewhere, be it hinterlands or places far away – the so-called city footprint – is of extraordinary proportions. Yet the modern architect seems utterly oblivious to the basic requirements of a functioning city: waste management and sewage treatment, air and water filtration, energy and heat generation, food production and processing are by and large still considered engineering annoyances to be hidden away or disregarded altogether.
Collectively, architects been unwilling – or incapable – to take on the challenges brought by the new environmental imperatives, becoming progressively dependent on a host of specialized disciplines. Insofar the next transformation of the city – and the renewal of the professional practice at large – is the result of embracing the new functions of renewable energy production, sustainable farming, effective waste management and efficient construction practices in buildings, architects are effectively outsourcing the transformative processes to engineers and consultants – and becoming increasingly more irrelevant in the process.