How is Life?——Designing for Earth

The period of growth since the advent of the Industrial Revolution has taken us to a point beyond the planetary boundaries*1, as we continue to exploit the voiceless and overdraft from future generations, while climate change and the North/South divide escalate at increasing speeds. The United Nation’s sustainable development goals implore us to reduce our environmental impact while holding onto industries that drive growth and provide us with the easy life, but the reality is dire, and now we must start thinking about prosperity without growth*2 rather than sustainable growth. We must look at not just industries, but how we live, and examine how we can reduce our burden on earth in every aspect, every component of life itself. Long accustomed to acquiring goods and services from the industrialized economy, we no longer have the skills to obtain food, clothing, shelter, and energy on our own, and the nexus of industrialized society does not allow for convenient escape from its grasp.　It is not easy to subvert the production-consumption-disposal paradigm, which is entrenched in the built environment developed in the second half of the twentieth century in which we continue to live. The self-portrait we have until now has been the constant replication of a built environment and convenient lifestyle based on the same assumptions. How do we escape from this pernicious cycle so that we can begin to live in an era of prosperity without growth?

If architecture is about the betterment of people’s lives, the work of architects should begin with the discovery — and triumph over — such encirclements. It is likely that the people sharing the same table at that time are not just us, here and now, but also disenfranchised people, people in other parts of the world, people of the future, and non-human creatures. We ask them, and ourselves, too: “How is Life?” We pose this question here, in the form of an architectural exhibition.