This feature has been created in collaboration with urbanNext, a multi-platform aimed at developing, disseminating and distributing content centered on architecture through a focus on the contemporary human milieu and its challenges. Architizer features a weekly discussion from urbanNext’s journals to support its investigation of urban conditions and innovations facing the architectural profession today.
“The architect has to become more of a politician,” says Alfredo Brillembourg in an interview with urbanNext correspondent Areti Markopoulou. The architect and founder of design practice Urban-Think Tank is chiefly invested in integrating a deeper interdisciplinary approach to architectural design, a tactic he believes can empower architects to combat extreme social and economic inequality currently facing the world’s cities.
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“The fastest growing phenomenon in today’s urbanized world is islands of wealth and ghettos of poverty, so we need to break that,” Brillembourg contends. He believes architects occupy a unique position within society to combat urban segregation by implementing their skills in a broader application to affect change, “the architect needs to expand his role, maybe he’s a systems thinker, maybe he’s a strategic designer, maybe he’s a hacker into policy.”
U-TT’s Metro Cable brings new infrastructure and mobility to Caracas’s informal neighborhoods.
Brillembourg, who is also the chair of Architecture and Urban Design at the Swiss Institute of Technology in Zurich, identifies a huge potential in the development of user-based technologies to assist architects in creating urban architectural solutions which would engage communities into the design process.
Suggesting innovations such as a smart-phone app which would allow citizens to vote remotely on public legislature, the development of augmented reality to allow designers to visualize the expanding uses of buildings. Urban Think-Tank is also experimenting with a tablet program that would allow slum dwellers to envision and reposition the layout of their communities.
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U-TT developed a pre-fabricated kit to build the Vertical Gym, a multi-level recreation complex in the Caracas slum of Chacao, “a piece of social infrastructure that has reduced crime rates, promoted healthy lifestyles, and strengthened social capital.” – U-TT
Brillembourg presents quite an optimistic vision of our urban future. “Social diversity and equal distribution of infrastructure and power back to the people will be the future of the 21st century,” he says. This will only be achieved as university research, corporations, local communities and politicians continue to work together to formulate “integrated think tank groups,” who will be “developing policy and working together to implement real applied solutions.”
Words by Joanna Kloppenburg.
This interview was created for urbanNext’s journal Expanding Design Practices. Read more from the journal on the urbanNext website.
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