The Future of Architecture

written by Herman Hertzberger
 

 

Architecture has always been the discipline par excellence that has lent itself to the representation of a new, better world, where exceptional buildings could be regarded as models embodying the makeability of this new order, however unconsciously that might occur. It is this ‘task’ of the architect that continues to haunt him and impede him from taking seriously the non-professional interventions issuing from common human motives in the banality of everyday life, let alone ascribing beauty to them. Nevertheless, the age in which we lived with the illusion that architecture could genuinely influence the world – thus setting trends rather than following them – is definitively behind us.