The City and The World: Madrid Symposium

The European Center for Architecture Art Design and Urban Studies and The Chicago Athenaeum: Museum of Architecture and Design present a challenging program on the future of the City and The World. The Symposium presents the challenges of contemporary architecture in building, urban planning, and design in general in this New World Era of a Renewed Environmental and Economic Order and with a new parallel Vision for the Design of World Cities. This next decade of the Twentieth-Second Century presents a new era of challenges for the design of buildings and cities worldwide. The depletion of natural resources, the challenge of new energy resources, the conservation of the environment, and the shifting of populations, industry, and culture will call for newer and bolder solutions to old and familiar problems. From London to Shanghai, new ideas are emerging to solve even the most problematic conditions. While reflecting upon their specific qualities and challenges, today’s cities form an ideal framework to question the relation between the contemporary practices of architecture and planning on their capacity to ‘make a city’ The conference therefore departs from the observation that, over the past two decades, the "urban project" or the "acupunctural intervention," often as part of a strategic project to restructure the city’s territory, has become the predominant framework for the production of contemporary architecture. While the ‘urban project’ is often the engine of urban restructuring, it has also become the vehicle for city-marketing strategies and the pursuit of a ‘Bilbao-effect’ in both large and small cities. The implicit architectural idea that speaks from this popular tendency of ‘exceptional’ architectural realizations condenses the city in specific city-parts and, even more often, in public buildings—often with a cultural or leisure program. This global phenomenon that deploys architecture and architects mainly for their iconic contribution to cities could be summarized as the proliferation of a generic form of architecture that in turn contributes to a generic development of cities worldwide. Beyond the stylistic debate around contemporary iconic building, it is the more general observation that architecture in present fails to develop, represent and materialize a common understanding of the shared space of the city, that will form the central issue of the design-research program The City and the World. Themes that have always been at the centre of architectural practice and research, such as housing typologies and their urban patterns, the continuity of public space, as well as the layout of infrastructures, are no longer the dominant vectors of architectural and urban discourse. With contributions and participation by politicians, city-planners and -architects, researchers, educators, architects and planners, the symposium will question the possible relevance of those themes for contemporary urban development and aim to define a set of priorities for architectural and urban reflection and planning. Symposium Brochure (PDF)