Imagining Architecture Beyond the End Times Workshop 2015

At the turn of the last century western society was confident about both moral and material progress: slavery had been abolished; women had achieved suffrage; and power (electricity), mobility (cars/jets), and communications (telephone/television) were transforming the world. In contrast, the turn of the new millennium is a time of anxious malaise as society appears locked in destructive fantasies: the fantasy that the market equals freedom; that politics can be replaced with risk management; that growth is unlimited; that human attention is a freely exploitable commodity; that change is not possible because nature is seen to be truer than culture, and the past truer than the future.

We find it easier to imagine ecological collapse, asteroid impact, and alien invasion, than it is to imagine a modest change to the current socio-economic system. The Architecture exchange held its second five-day workshop in Yorkshire, England, Imagining Architecture Beyond The End Times, to address architecture’s role within and beyond the current catastrophe. Ten participants presented projects and theoretical statements that staked out how to re-conceptualize time and history as determinants of the architectural imagination.