Fill this form to have the opportunity to join the New Generations platform: submissions will be reviewed on a daily-basis, and the most innovative practices will have the chance to be part of the media's coverage and participate in our cultural agenda, including events, research projects, workshops, exhibitions and publications.
New Generations is a European platform that investigates the changes in the architectural profession ever since the economic crisis of 2008. We analyse the most innovative emerging practices at the European level, providing a new space for the exchange of knowledge and confrontation, theory, and production.
Since 2013, we have involved more than 300 practices from more than 20 European countries in our cultural agenda, such as festivals, exhibitions, open calls, video-interviews, workshops, and experimental formats. We aim to offer a unique space where emerging architects could meet, exchange ideas, get inspired, and collaborate.
A project by Itinerant Office
Within the cultural agenda of New Generations
Editor in chief Gianpiero Venturini
Editorial team Pablo Ibáñez Ferrera
Copyediting and Proofreading Akshid Rajendran
If you have any questions, need further information, if you'd like to share with us a job offer, or just want to say hello please, don't hesitate to contact us by filling up this form. If you are interested in becoming part of the New Generations network, please fill in the specific survey at the 'join the platform' section.
More than another plea to the political commitment of architects, this essay seeks to understand how neoliberalism challenged an entire way of practicing architecture. If words like «city» or «plan» are just an uncomfortable embarrassment in the mouth of so many architects, or simply old relics placed in the showcase of the museum of architectural history, it is because the entire foundations of the idea of project – which marked the experience of architecture throughout the twentieth century – were shattered by the progressive dismantling of the Welfare State. That’s the reason why the «architectural object» is the true successor of the idea of «architecture as project»: it consumes and consummates the death of the project while giving formal and conceptual expression to the position that architecture occupies in the political economy of neoliberalism. On the other hand, the current disciplinary anxiety for the «essential values of architecture» or the «poetics of form» is not a coincidence: by making each architectural object an eternal spring poem, full of promises of happiness, it redeems the harsh reality of a profession crossed by precariousness and social irrelevance, concealing the neoliberal dissolution of public institutions. This is the reason why the object is always private: a privatized architecture, that is, an architecture expropriated from its public condition. Nonetheless, if we are left with nothing more than pessimism, this doesn’t mean any fatalistic resignation, but means, as Walter Benjamin already knew, that this is the only point from one can start: «il faut organiser le pessimisme».
Bio Pedro Levi Bismarck is an architect graduated by the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Porto (2008). He worked and lived in Berlin and Porto. He is currently a researcher in CEAU (Centro de Estudos de Arquitectura e Urbanismo – FAUP), where is developing his PhD Thesis. Between 2015 and 2019, he was Assistant Professor of Theory of Architecture in this Faculty. He is also editor of Punkto Journal and of the editorial project Stones Against Diamonds. He has been writing in several magazines of architecture, art and critical thinking.
2020
Title Architecture and «pessimism»
Author Pedro Levi Bismarck
Editors Ana Catarina Costa, Paulo AM Monteiro, Pedro Levi Bismarck
Publisher Stones against diamonds