Maps, Scripts, Prototypes

Markus Schäfer, Hosoya Schäfer Architects, Zürich
Vortrag, 07.05.2007, 19.00h

NEXT LIFE
In a continuous endeavour to question how we live, the summer-term
lectures will focus on architecture’s projective capacities.

Traditionally, the construction of habitats has been a conservative act.
We build shelters to preserve our lives; they are sanctuaries for
restoring ourselves as well as storing our belongings. In contrast,
designing and planning are primarily forward-looking practices: We
challenge the present to uncover latent potentials and project better
living conditions. It is a vigorous act as we break with familiar and
depart into unknown territories. How are we to overcome this fundamental
dichotomy?

Modernist utopias and post-structuralism caution us from exaggerated
idealism, yet architects can’t deny their responsibility in projecting
the future. Demographic shifts, climatic changes and the reconfiguration
of global resources challenge our future lives and force us to rethink
common buildings and cities. These fundamental developments are overlaid
with consumer’s culture permanent proclamation of ‘the next thing’. How
can we avoid the pitfall of trendy prognostics and still engage changing
life conditions? How are we to distill the essential from the
superficial in shaping the architecture of the next life?

We have invited a series of speakers, who approach architecture from a
multidisciplinary perspective and thus hold the promise to challenge the
discipline from the in- and outside at once.