Hello and welcome to the new season of Design Emergency. I'm Alice Rawsthorn, co-founder of Design Emergency with Paola Antonelli. And since launching it six years ago, Paola and I have had the pleasure of interviewing many global leaders in design and architecture who are all helping to build a better future. And we're thrilled that our interviewee in this episode is one of the most influential architects of our time, David Chipperfield. David grew up on a farm in southwest England and worked for Britain's architectural grandees Richard Rogers and Norman Foster before opening his own practice in 1985.
David Chipperfield Architects now has offices in Berlin, London, Milan, Santiago de Compostela and Shanghai. It's responsible for many memorable buildings from the Neues Museum in Berlin to the Royal Academy in London and the San Michele Cemetery in Venice. Its current works in progress include the Nobel Center in Stockholm and the National Archaeological Museum in Athens. David also enjoys working on very different scales at Fundación, the non-profit foundation he has established in Santiago to experiment with environmental, economic, and cultural projects in Galicia. So we decided to ask him about his take on architecture's evolution during his career and how its defining values have changed. So David, thank you very much for joining us. Let's start with that core question. How have the values of architecture changed?
Well, first of all, thank you for asking me onto your podcast. Fortunately or unfortunately, my career is now quite a long one. And when I began as a student back in the '70s and '80s, clearly the profession and the world were in a different place. And in one way, you know, as architects, our position tends to very much reflect the societal priorities. And one could say very, very simply that the generation that taught me, who were the sort of post-war generation, worked very much in the public sector, worked on planning, on housing, on new universities. You know, it was a time of public works. And then by the time I graduated in the middle to late '80s, the situation had changed. In the UK we had recession and we had Margaret Thatcher dismantling the public sector. So in a way that marked very clearly a shift from a sort of publicly motivated society to a private one, to one of financialization, and that clearly reflected a change in architectural practice where we've seen that shift over the last 30 or 40 years.
So if we look at specific strands of architecture, I mean, one that has a fundamental role is inclusivity and architecture's ability to engage and empower as many people as possible. That mission was crystal clear in the earlier era of the focus on public sector architecture that you've talked about. How is it being executed now?
Again, we are no worse and no better than the society that surrounds us, within which we operate, and the profession has very much adjusted itself collectively and individually to this. And I would say that tendencies which were always there to some degree have become very exaggerated, and it has become increasingly difficult to establish common ground and common purpose. I think all architects are united by a general sense of common purpose. I think we're trained to believe that as architects we can make a better world, and that our territory is clearly the built environment, and I think everybody holds to that desire. But within practice, that's become more and more difficult, and the reasons for that are many, but very much to do with a sort of lack of engagement and trust. That the profession, as the profession, has inevitably become, let's say, more rancorous. I mean, it's an unfortunate condition for architects that we believe that we have social purpose and collectively we would like to contribute, but in the end our contribution is very much individualistic.
And the last 30 or 40 years, which has really wallowed in the financialization of everything, architecture is not immune from that. And so I would say a disproportionate amount of architectural talent has been applied to the market and the motivations and priorities of the market, as opposed to the more abstract and collective concerns of our society. And of course, now we've hit a wall where we've all slowly and rather too slowly woken up to the challenges, both environmental and social, that have been significantly, I would say, neglected by us all in all sectors over the last 30 to 40 years.
And as you rightly say, there has been a general awakening in that people have accepted the gravity of the situation we're in. It's widely accepted. This is an extraordinarily turbulent and uncertain time in history. So, do you believe that the architecture community can play a positive role in addressing these complex challenges? And do you have any examples to share of projects that you believe are already doing so?
Well, your first question is, you know, do I believe we can? Again, I don't think we're in any different position in a way than we all are individually, in the sense we've all understood. Well, with some significant exceptions, but most of us have started to understand not only the question of environment, but also of social inequality, which I'll talk about a little bit. But it's not so easy. You know, we've given a lot of our weapons away. So the profound problem of our society, looking at through the lens of architecture, I would say, has been the erosion of planning and long-term thinking. Everything has conspired towards short-termism. Planning got a sort of bad name for itself through the generation we referred to of the '60s and '70s. They were visionary in many ways, but some of those visions were not robust enough, and there was a sort of hangover from that that coincided with the sort of Thatcherite ideologies of depowering the public sector. So they all work together in a way. You free the market up, you erode the requirement for administration, and you let the market find itself and motivate. And of course, it all sounds good, but we've realized that the market without direction can lead us in dangerous places. And in terms of architecture, that direction would be called planning, and that would be planning is the anticipation of individual activities towards a sort of the collective result.
So coming back slightly more precisely to your question, are we capable of directing our energies more efficiently? Because certainly the overall construction industry contributes a rather large proportion to our CO2 production, more than 40%. So clearly within our overall territory there is a significant opportunity to improve that. Can we do it without really rethinking it? No. Can we do it on an individual basis by choosing better window frames and having, you know, timber structure instead of concrete structure? No. We need to go much higher upstream and think about where are we building, who are we building for, what are we building out of. You know, it has to be a linked-up thing. If you build a sustainable housing disconnected from public transportation, let's say, you're missing a lot of the picture. So the fact that we've given up planning and that we don't seem to show much interest in regaining it because it's a political question, I think, is a huge question for us.
And without putting back into place some long-term considerations about how we treat our physical and natural environment, but also the decisions we're making about how we build our cities and about how we're leveraging the value of land and property in our cities, has also had enormous social effect. We are sort of cleansing the city of people, of the richness of citizenship, by an uncontrolled exploitation of land value. So we've got a double whammy here: environmental and the lack of planning, lack of control means that we're also exacerbating social inequalities.
It's a very grim picture, but a wholly realistic one. And yet there is an enormous amount of thoughtful, sensitive and experimental work going on. Can you think of any examples of either your projects or other architects' projects that have had a positive impact on the huge challenges that we face? So if we begin with social inequality, it is a problem that has been addressed by architecture in the past, not always successfully, but sometimes so. Are there any examples of current practice that you do find hopeful and cause for optimism in?
I would say that architecture can't do anything. It's society using architecture that can do something. We can, and I think you're hinting at it, we can find very, very good, sincere and inspirational small projects. There's no doubt about that. You know, in England there's a number of people doing some very interesting social housing supported by a particular local district or authority. There are moments of hope and inspiration and example, and I would never want to knock the small example because I think this is something that we have to deal with. In a way, when you have these huge, huge problems, how do you tackle them? Do you tackle them only by huge solutions or do you tackle them by small inspirational examples? I think a bit of both.
The profession has over the last 30 or 40 years become slightly too adjusted to the idea that we fight a sort of guerrilla warfare, that we work sort of outside of conventional support and through individual genius you break through and you create moments of inspiration. And there have been an enormous number of inspirational buildings over the last 30, 40 years. So it's a sort of paradox. In one sense, I would say that the quality of individual buildings over this last 30 or 40 years certainly has not eroded. I would say there's an enormous amount of innovation and creativity, formal creativity and even technical advance. And there's significant, I would say, you know, and this is probably the best part of this picture, there's significant advances in technology and materials and in terms of use of energy and understanding how to make buildings more efficient. We are, I think, making enormous advances in that. Whether society wants to embrace in a serious way all of those advances is another question.
But I think the biggest challenge we have is to shake off the notion that architects are the champions. We've still got this slightly heroic notion of the architect, and the architectural profession didn't do anything to shake that off in the last 30 or 40 years. You know, the terminology 'star architect' certainly does reflect a certain attitude towards the profession, and one that probably is slightly unhealthy, I would say. And that as long as we see the idea that an architect or a project will show the way, I think we're misleading ourselves and in a way staying in the same sort of box that we've been in for the last 40 years. So we have to change that very much.
However, I would not contradict the implication I think you're saying, is that there are everywhere some people working in generally interesting ways and starting to take on priorities, criteria and judgments which are becoming much more appropriate to our condition. Is it enough? No. Because we need much bigger, you know, I mean, we just don't have time. So we need to see substantial shift in policy, not just in frontline activities. Frontline activities are absolutely necessary to show example and to keep us all believing in the potential. But we need policy shift as well.
Indeed. But speaking as an outsider to architecture, someone who's very interested in it but doesn't work in the sector, it seems to me that there's been a polarization. As you rightly say, issues like social equality have always been embraced by architecture, but often lone radicals. I mean, Peter Barber would fall into that category. But there are also practices who are working repeatedly at huge scale. So, Lacaton and Vassal and their work in public housing in France would be an example of that, and we see more and more young architects wanting to focus on social and humanitarian projects rather than working for big commercial practices. So, I think there is, you'll probably accuse me of being blindly overoptimistic, but I think there are huge kernels of hope there. If we talk about the other huge challenge that you've alluded to, the climate emergency, are there enough examples there of it being addressed at scale? And if so, what do you consider them to be?
