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Phineas Harper: The Latest Architecture and News

Degrowth: the Radical (Re)Action Needed to Avoid Total Economic and Environmental Collapse

ArchDaily is happy to announce our Media Partnership with @Oslo Architecture Triennale 2019! Throughout 2019 we will be sharing stories, interviews, and content related to the Triennale, which this year revolves around the theme of Degrowth. The interview below introduces Degrowth in the context of practice today - and hints at how this radical idea could irreversibly change how we value architectural production.

The world faces some significant challenges. The UN climate change report, which explained that we may have just 12 years and need “unprecedented changes” to avoid devastating effects from climate change, was released into a world that seemed to be plenty busy processing other things, such as rising economic inequality, increasingly partisan politics, escalating conflicts, and refugee crises, to name a few.

Winning Team Selected to Curate 2019 Oslo Architecture Triennale

The Oslo Architecture Triennale has announced the winner of the open call for Chief Curator of their 2019 event: Architecture and Engineering practice Interrobang (Maria Smith and Matthew Dalziel), with critic Phineas Harper and urban researcher Cecilie Sachs Olsen.

The winning team’s proposal, entitled Common Futures, seeks to acknowledge and investigate the “need to revise the pace and scale of extraction, production, consumption, development, and building that has driven the growth of industrialized societies and economies throughout the 20th century.”

The Barbican: A Lesson from London's Past for the Housing Crisis of Today

A higher percentage of the world’s population lives in cities than in any point in history, and with an ever increasing demand for housing, some of the planet’s older and more condensed cities are struggling to keep up. This crisis is currently front and center in London, where median housing prices 12 times the median income have prompted a large number of radical solutions to quell the storm, but with politicians so far declining to take decisive action a viable answer remains a distant possibility.

In a new video produced by a collaboration between The Architectural Review and the Architecture Foundation, Phineas Harper proposes London take lessons from housing solutions from the past. The example on display here is The Barbican, a massive housing block constructed in the 1960s and 70s, and featuring amenities such as an arts center, music school, restaurants, pub and a cinema, all while providing comfortable, affordable housing for the middle-class professionals at which it was targeted. The video recounts the tale of the project's inception and its design ideals, revealing how this 50-year-old fortress in central London could be an inspiration for the architecture - and the politics - of today.