Radical Architecture of the Future is a bold title for an architecture book that brings together work that is overwhelmingly real, instead of seductively rendered. The thread that binds this collection of often wildly dissonant projects together is not simply radicalism, but the recognition that contemporary architectural design must engage with the very people it is designed to serve. To showcase these ideals, author Beatrice Galilee has assembled a broad sweep of contemporary design, spanning from community-focused designs, both cultural and industrial, to site-specific and virtual installations and photography essays, as well as traditional architectural projects both big and small.
There are bold juxtapositions, from explicitly political buildings like Heneghan Peng's Palestinian Museum in Birzeit, Palestine, through to poetic landscaping projects like Junya Ishigami's Art Biotop Water Garden in Nasu, Japan. There are residential renewal works that add fresh thinking to urgent issues like sustainability. Photographic essays lay bare the beauty, banality and terror of the late-capitalist landscape.
There’s a lot going on within these pages. Radical Architecture of the Future is most successful when it eschews the celebratory and aspirational tone that pervades architectural publishing in favour of provocation and the promotion of hitherto marginalised and overlooked territories. It is a book to challenge preconceptions and expand horizons. Examples include Atelier Masōmī and Studio Chahar’s impressive Hikma Religious and Secular Complex in Dandaji, Niger, and Forensic Architecture’s meticulous graphic analysis of flashpoints within global conflict.
Galilee spent five years as the curator of architecture and design at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Her prominent role as a curator, convenor, and creator within the architectural field allows her to tap into the currents of change that swirl around the global modern architecture ‘scene’. As well as the ideas on display, the book also chronicles the end of the modernist monoculture, as architecture starts to live through its own reckoning with representation and power structures.
Plasencia Auditorium and Congress Center, SelgasCano, Plasencia, Spain, 2017.
Intimate Strangers, Andrés Jaque / Office for Political Innovation, 2016.
New Andean Architecture, Freddy Mamani, El Alto, Bolivia, 2005. from the book El Alto published by EditionTaube
In the Robot Skies, Liam Young, 2016.
Color(ed) Theory, Amanda Williams, Chicago, IL, USA, 2014–16.
DMZ Vault of Life and Knowledge, Mass Studies, 2015.
Marching On, Bryony Roberts, Mabel O. Wilson, and the Marching Cobras ofNew York, New York, NY, USA, 2017.
Flint Is Family Part I, LaToya Ruby Frazier, 2016–17.
Space Enabled. Danielle Wood, with project contributors Fohla Mouftaou, Lola Fatoyinbo, David Lagomasino and Danielle Wood.
INFORMATION
Radical Architecture of the Future, Beatrice Galilee, Phaidon, £39.95
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