AIArchitect

The current economic crisis-inspired debate on the role of the government intervention in the free market draws an easy parallel to building industry approaches for creating sustainable neighborhoods. In the financial markets, financiers pray for tax payer-funded bailouts while traditional conservatives assert that no bank is too big to fail, and populst liberals grin at the idea of Wall Street barons selling their Hamptons vacation home to their housekeeper for an affordably depressed rate. In the sustainable building industry, architects and developers looking to create entire neighborhoods along sustainable lines either demand that an ambitious sustainability criteria or LEED rating be met, or leave it up to baseline municipal regulations. In both situations, the question is “How much should we let the free market under perform in order to hold onto the values of unfettered marketplace competition?”

by Eric Rawlings, AIA

When I graduated from architecture school in 1995, after years of hearing nothing but bad news about our profession, I had no idea what I was going to do with my useless degree. Thankfully, we were at the tail end of a real-estate meltdown, caused by a savings and loan scandal, and our job market finally started to open up. I was grateful to be able to find a job making $24,000 a year, almost $10,000 less than a starting school teacher at the time.
(Click here to read the full open letter, then come back to this screen to add your comments.)

As I start typing this, the bad-news volcano that Google News has become is quiet.

I have to scroll down a third of the way on the page before I find words like “bailout”, “billions”, “Fed”, “Wall St.”, “debt”, “recession”, “Great Depression”, and “fail” (now as a noun). Partisan shrieking from angry legislators down Pennsylvania Ave. has been dispersed into the provinces, as Congress stands up bravely to pledge their support for never letting this happen again, should they be graciously re-elected, and no major banking institutions have failed in what seems like weeks. Ah. 

But it won’t last. The choking financial sector malaise we’re all trying to understand will find a new way to confound us and make us cynical (then angry) about regulators and financial markets we had never before heard of.

by Benjamin H. Bratton
SCI_Arc and UC San Diego 

Weaponizing Architecture was the subject of the blog on August 22 with Henry Louis Miller satirizing whether the U.S. should build a Toxicwall along its southern border. The result was a torrent of commentary. That subsided, and then, this past week, came a blog entry from Benjamin H. Bratton that, although lengthy, is provoking. Enjoy.