The texts that make up this selection—light yet lucid, and often considered minor (lecture introductions, forewords, journalistic articles, and short essays)—allow Iñaki Ábalos (Professor of Architectural Projects at ETSAM, Chair of the Department of Architecture at the Harvard GSD from 2012 to 2016, distinguished architect, and prolific author) to explore what 21st-century architecture might look like and what the role of the "architects of modern life" will be. In these writings, he discusses peers of his generation who are establishing innovative theoretical and practical positions (Johnston&Marklee, Sergison&Bates, Lacaton&Vassal, Amid.cero9, Lateral, Christ&Gantenbein, Liu Yichun, David Adjaye, Ciro Najle, Beigel, Christou, Moe...), critically revisits his mentors—at times heterodox, at others unjustly forgotten (Taut, Hilberseimer, Mies, Fuller, Goldsmith, Le Ricolais, Price, Branzi, Cook, Higueras, Peña Ganchegui...)—and elegantly ignores the star system.
Driven by the rapid social, cultural, economic, and technological transformation of the last two decades, which has rendered many approaches obsolete and shifted architectural production away from Europe and even the US toward new centers of power in Asia, Latin America, and soon Africa, issues such as late capitalism, recycling, obsolescence, energy, resources, infrastructure, skyscrapers, the metropolis, and landscape have moved to the forefront. In this context, Ábalos views pragmatism as a valuable vein of thought and identifies productive foundations for action in the instrumentality of the project, understood as a laboratory of ideas. Provocatively, the new techniques available (used without naivety) and the emergence of a thermodynamic (rather than tectonic) architecture lead him to defend disciplinary autonomy in these times of disciplinary contamination, in search of a new beauty based on the inevitable scale of the enormous, the playful picturesqueness of the anecdotal, and the terrifying sublimity of the technical.
