The moment of change

It was the moment for something to happen.

— Diana Agrest

I wish that it still existed.

— Frank Gehry

Institute for Architecture and Urban Studies was founded in 1968 as an NGO, non-profit experimental think-tank for progressive inquiry into architectural history and theory and contemporary urban issues. It was created to step aside from predetermined disciplines and share, discuss possible problems and alternatives to traditional forms of education and practice. 

They laid the foundation, changed the way we talk and think about architecture today.

That movement was a reflection towards economical conditions in the world, they had a god feeling that something is happening Now. Institute was operating for 20 years and was closed because we reached Culture 2, that V.Paperniy is describing as stabilization, retro-action, coming back to the roots. It was opened again in 2003 partly because of 9/11, it was a Moment again to think and change what became overdue now. 

Coming back to the moments in Cultures. V.Paperniy is a russian culturologist and sociologist who identified two terms that are cyclical. Culture 1 and Culture 2. First - is modern, progressive, burning all the bridges, starting from the blank page (20s, 70s, 50s in Russia) Culture 2 is an opposite one - history, memory, heritage, monumental, venerable tendency and lines up with Stalinist architecture.

As an example of Culture one - Burov House (1927)  “an exotic, provincial curiosity” and becomes “the original force with which the folk genius creates, on the basis of antique tradition, a new architecture, unsevered from and connected to, but in no way ceding to, the architecture of the Byzantine era, the proto-Renaissance or the Renaissance.” Looks so weird in the context? Right?

Now we just passed that long and tasteless Culture 2. Or not yet?

Have we reached the moment of awareness already? Where the action will take place in the world? What are current world issues that inform architectural and design processes? 

Of course, there is always an Opposition. 

It would be the world’s biggest nightmare if the Institute were still alive.

— Mark Wigley