The Winter of Our Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Project

The lecture analyzes the contemporary crisis in architecture, exploring the decline of the concept of the “project”—understood as a transformative and utopian vision—which has now been crushed by market forces.

The project stems from humans’ need to adapt to the environment in which they lives. Unlike animals, humans do not possess innate instincts and always live “out of context.” The project thus stems from our species’ ability to adapt to the environment we inhabit. This process of adaptation is nothing other than the creation of a world that inevitably leads us to radically alter what already exists.  With the advent of large civilizations, the modification of the territory became not only a necessity but also the embodiment of authority and power. This power was the organization of the labor required to construct large, monumental complexes. Designing, therefore, means producing a plan whose purpose is to coordinate the workforce. The stereotype of slaves building the pyramids is misleading, because the construction of large-scale works of prehistory and antiquity were complex social machines that brought together manual and intellectual skills in a synthesis uniting abstract thought and construction practices. This idea of the project is conceptualized in the Renaissance, culminates with the advent of industrial capitalism, and has declined in recent times.