Franklin Azzi on the architecture of the future

FA: I believe that when you analyse all the history of architecture, most of the time the evolution of architecture has been part of a crisis. I mean, a crisis will bring on a new kind of architecture. Right now, we have an enormous economic crisis that has continued for a long time, we have a COVID crisis, plus a social crisis which is enormous. All of these will change the way we do architecture and I believe that my generation will be the ambassadors of those changes.

We don’t design buildings like they used to be designed in the 1980s. Nowadays, designing something that is just formalistic is not enough for a building. You need to deal with sustainable design, and this is a design which is not only plastic. There are a lot of techniques behind it, there is a lot of knowledge. We have to build new things with materials that are already there, for example. And that’s very different from the 80s, when we wanted to appreciate new materials, new plastics.