Trinity Square car park, Gateshead, Tyne & Wear.

Talk

Back to the future

Lost futures / futures found

Monday 3 April 2017 6.30 - 8pm

Geological Society, Piccadilly, W1.

£12, £6 concessions. Includes talk and drinks reception.

Sold out

Futures Found

Go to the exhibition

In an age of austerity, do the utopian ideals of postwar Modernism offer any solutions to our current situation?

Looking to the future was an essential part of Modernism; its postwar advocates believed that they were building a new and better world. In a second age of austerity, when we face housing shortages once more, it often seems that architecture has lost the initiative when it comes to social innovation.

Do we have anything to learn by looking back to heroic postwar architecture or does this risk turning Modernism into historicism? Should we instead seek entirely new solutions for the problems of today, or could the invisible strategies that lay behind Modernism’s successes, be unearthed in order to develop tools for going back to the future? Or indeed, has imagining the future itself become passé?

Speakers:
Peter Barber – architect, principal, Peter Barber Architects, and lecturer, University of Westminster
Farshid Moussavi RA – architect, founder, Farshid Moussavi Architecture (FMA), and Professor in Practice of Architecture, Harvard Graduate School of Design
Douglas Murphy – architect, architecture correspondent, Icon magazine, and author of Last Futures: Nature, Technology and the End of Architecture
Adrian Forty (chair) – Emeritus Professor of the History of Architecture, The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL