Projects and Publications

Issue number 428 of Architecture & Urbanism was centered around a symposium organized by Mostafavi and White at Cornell University titled "Implementing Architecture." The speakers, drawn from practices large and small, presented recent critical projects, foregrounding the role of project architect and focusing on a particular phase such as detail design or construction administration. Throughout the conference, design was observed as negotiation and research rather than as autonomy and impulse.

Design disciplines are challenged by the condition of the zero point. "Zero-context," "cities from scratch," and "zero-carbon" developments all force designers to address important questions regarding the strategic relevance and impact of a design intervention. As much as the zero point presents naïve innocence and embodies contradictory notions—such as crisis versus abundance or context versus model—it also creates a ground for doubt, self-critique, and rejuvenation for architecture and urbanism. As projects, indeed entire “new” cities, are built before they can even be imagined and then repackaged and replicated as models for any context, what do these projects suggest for the design disciplines? Rather than reductive aestheticization, or total rejection, what are possible critical ways to reflect on this condition? Beyond a focus on the vast scales and ambitions of these projects, it is important to see them as symptomatic of a much broader condition within contemporary architecture and urbanism.