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Promotion: Architect David Chipperfield voiced criticism of his career during a Doha Design Forum panel discussion, now live on Dezeen.
Chipperfield was speaking on a panel at the Doha Design Forum (DDF) titled ‘Agents of Change: How Design Shapes Society and Culture’, alongside London’s Design Museum director Tim Marlow and Qatari architect Ibrahim Jaidah.
Moderated by DDF Editorial Director Jelena Trkulja, the panel explored the ways in which design and architecture have a positive and negative impact on lifestyle, culture and the environment.
Chipperfield expresses a sense of anxiety about today’s ideas of technological advancement and its consequences, particularly with regard to social change and environmental crisis.
“I think we have changed the way we think about progress itself. For the first time in my life, people have lost a certain faith in the absolute concept of progress,” he said.
Issues of cultural heritage, identity and globalism are all “expressions of anxiety” that can be traced back to consumerism and its impact on resources and climate, he added.
Chipperfield said that although the most critical decisions about the built environment are made further up the “food chain”, before architects are involved, they are still part of a process that makes cities worse.
“I would say that as architects, over the last 30 or 40 years, we have been involved in a process that has not necessarily improved our cities, but has made them more expensive to the point where most people can no longer afford them. Can’t afford to live in them,” he said.
“We had a kind of social cleansing of cities like London, Paris, Zurich. Everyone had to live outside. We were part of that.”
The British architect has also criticized his profession’s involvement in globalization, saying it makes all cities look the same and leads to “materials being moved from one side of the planet to the other without any reason”.
But he says that, like many contemporary architects and designers, he has now retooled his practice in an attempt to correct some of those mistakes.
The architect talks about a project he completed through his research agency Fundación RIA, which saw a new public seating area built on a former car park on the seafront in the Spanish town of Porto Galicia after five years of community consultation district.
“In the mature years of my career, I’ve had great satisfaction in having a village as my client, a community as my client, and trying to find physical solutions and capture common problems and concerns that might improve quality of life,” Qi said. Pfield said.
Marlowe agreed with Chipperfield, adding that educating the public and trying to change tastes were crucial to realizing such a project, as was industrial design.
“If we want to find ways to reuse plastic, we have to move away from our obsession with perfect single-color materials and actually have something that looks like the Play-Doh we had as kids when they were all Being combined in the same box,” he said.
Jaidah, whose past works include Doha’s Al Thumama Stadium and some of Qatar’s most iconic buildings, spoke of how he has seen tastes change in Qatar during his lifetime.
“I’ve seen this firsthand over my 30-plus-year career,” he said. “In the beginning, identity was literal: we had to keep doing what we were already doing. Because when oil came along, our history stopped and that dialect disappeared.”
“It evolved differently than the rest of the world – there was Gothic, then Renaissance, then Bauhaus,” he continued. “No, it stopped here, and then the International Style came along, and then all these boxes came along.”
Since 2000, adaptive reuse has become more common and considered, he said, as international designers and architects “help us redefine our identity or our culture.”
“Your culture goes beyond the skin of the building,” Jada said. “It’s your environment, it’s the environment around you.”
“I think the younger generation, the next generation, are going to be lucky because they’re going to build on what they’ve seen. Our generation has to start from scratch to get inspired again.”
Chipperfield concluded by noting that there were lessons to be learned from Qatar’s approach to urban planning, and mentioned the Msheireb Cultural District, a “unique” area surrounding the M7 Cultural Center where the event was held.
“We have eroded our planning system,” Chipperfield said. “The government here [in Doha] Decided to impose an idea and create a part of the city. In most cities – and I mean outside Switzerland – there is no planning agency because we have accepted the concept of the free market. “
“When you look at the business district, it’s a very pure expression of market forces, just like London is now,” he continued. “If you leave it alone, the market is going to do that and I think that’s something we have to think about.”
The panel discussion took place on February 26 as part of the Doha Design Forum, an event held every two years and held for the first time this year. For more information about the event, visit the Doha Design website.
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