I remember February 27, 2013 because that was the day Aaron Betsky asked a good question on his Beyond Buildings blog at Architect Magazine. Not that he doesn’t ask good questions on other days…because he does…but this particular day presented architecture with the provocative title, “Architecture Beyond Work: Will Architecture and Work Disappear?”
Mr. Betsky is talking about a couple of things. One, as he puts it, that “the idea that architecture is the act of producing functional machines that ideally have some evidence of how they were made might be outdated.” Extending from this is the idea that architecture doesn’t have to do this anymore because that was a modernist thing anyway and we have evolved beyond all that because of technological, social, and economic shifts. Moreover, architecture that communicates its “work” or “workings” is a concept based on what Mr. Betsky calls “old-fashioned means of production.”
