The 31st Pietro Belluschi Lecture: David Chipperfield

Thank you very much. Good evening. I'm honored to give this talk in memory of Pietro Belluschi. I also thank MIT and the Leventhal Center for their support. I find it increasingly difficult to give lectures about my work, but I'm more excited and committed about the responsibility of being an architect than ever. We operate at a moment where we have too willingly accepted the atomization of our society. We must find ways of fighting against this through the way we work. As architects, we have a responsibility to remind ourselves of the collective potential of architecture. We cannot advocate practice only through singular buildings. We must think about what contribution our buildings make to social and environmental challenges. I'll show a few projects. In Valencia, we turned a VIP building into a more open public space. In St. Louis, we extended a museum in a park. In Seoul, we created a building with a garden instead of a tower. But the project that most formed our practice was the reconstruction of the Neues Museum in Berlin. It stood as a ruin for 40 years after WWII. Our approach was to repair it like a piece of archaeology, keeping everything that survived and reframing it. This required enormous collaboration and public dialogue. The project was controversial, but we argued that rebuilding it as a copy would humiliate the authenticity of what survived. Through this, we developed an attitude of finding the project within the existing conditions. This methodology has influenced our work in many other projects, such as the Royal Academy in London and the restoration of St. Mark's Square in Venice. Ultimately, architecture must serve collective ideas and deal with collective anxieties.

Citizens, I was shouted at in the street. We had public demonstrations, candlelit demonstrations at night. I had to explain the project continuously for nearly 12 years. The project took 6 years planning and 6 years building. It was absolutely symbolic to the reconstruction. My German friends apologized, but I argued that if we expect people to be interested in architecture, we should celebrate that they are interested, even if it's not always convenient. I found it encouraging that people felt so strongly. On the day of the soft opening, 10,000 people stood in a queue. There was anticipation of rejection, but the building was well received. Angela Merkel opened it. The project was the result of an approach to dealing with ruination. The success was the process, the engagement with everybody. We sat in meetings with different opinions and finally I said, 'Let's all sit in the same room.' We formed an executive system of collaborative decision-making, which was not very German. The theme of my talk is the anxiety about how architects have managed to keep ourselves amused by doing good buildings. The health of architecture through publications might seem good, but architecture has become a rarefied commodity. Most of the world we build is poorly considered. We should measure our contribution by our general influence on society. When I was invited to direct the architecture biennale, I insisted on a theme: common ground. I asked colleagues not to show how good they were individually, but to present ourselves collectively. Common ground was a reference to the common good and things we share. I insisted that projects be justified by the theme. 103 architects played along. Zaha Hadid initially showed an opera house, but finally showed projects that influenced her. Herzog & de Meuron showed their opera house in Hamburg with newspaper articles protesting the project, highlighting the difficulty of delivering public projects. I would say that we have tried to respond to sustainability concerns. We fight for ideas of reuse. However, the issues that influence our environment are decided before architects get involved. We need to be involved much further upstream, in planning strategies and policy. The question isn't only how we build, but what, where, and for whom. We need proactive planning. We have witnessed the erosion of planning structures. There is a conspiracy of ideological free market, lack of public investment, and lack of confidence in expertise. We must tackle existential challenges. A modest project in London: the LSE wanted to knock down a building, but we proposed reusing it. It was difficult and will be cheaper to knock down, but we need to show that we can deliver high quality through reuse. These are gestures, but we need cumulative gestures. Nearly 10 years ago, I was asked by the president of Galicia to advise on the poor state of the built environment. The territory has extraordinary nature but ugly buildings due to lack of planning control. The president was concerned about ugliness, but we saw it as a symptom. I saw an opportunity to step outside conventional practice. We started with three young architects in my living room. Now we are nearly 20 in Santiago de Compostela. We don't wait for phone calls; we provoke. We identify important issues. Galicia is a perfect laboratory. We looked at urban conditions, unplanned development, lack of protection, dominated by cars. We considered the implication of commercial activity. The region suffers from change in economies. We are convinced that quality of life is secured by the environment. Galicia is not rich, but people declare high quality of life. The Anglo-Saxon model says you need money, but here quality of life comes from the environment. So, we work to protect that. We do projects on traffic, public transport, working on the front line with communities. We don't present ideas to planning commissions; we work with 50 people in the community. We do planning on the ground. We have done many projects: improving public space, writing competitions for other architects, working with timber companies, and with MIT and other institutions. We are working towards a territorial plan for the region, advocating for an integrated, horizontal perspective. Two years ago, we took up a new headquarters in Santiago, with research studios, conferences, exhibitions. The foundation Caseria is a place of meeting, with a kitchen and canteen. It has become an embassy where people come to talk. It is an artificial way of practicing architecture, not a model, but it has been interesting. I spent most of my life trying to persuade people, and architects are often untrusted. This is the first time I've been trusted. If we work in this way and declare our commitment to the common good, we can find a better relationship with society. Thank you very much.