Architecture in a Recession

Newton's Cenotaph by Étienne-Louis Boullée

Looking at recent price trends and global activity, it appears that the United States is on the verge of another recession. When a recession hits, people spend less money and decide to build fewer new buildings. Architects and their ideas take an interesting turn during this time; architects who don't have as much work to focus on think about the future and how architecture can influence or work with the world to come, with alternative futures dominating the visions rather than disciplinary mechanics. This period of forward-thinking and design is known as "paper architecture," and it took the form of playful architectural projects that were never meant to be realized.

Broadacre City by Frank Lloyd Wright

Many different self-sustaining megacities or larger buildings were designed during this time period to contain a city in a form. Such as Frank Lloyd Wright's Broadacre City (1932), which is the antithesis of a city and the apotheosis of newly born suburbia, shaped through Wright's unique vision. Within this city, each family would receive one acre of land, most people would live in apartments, and flying automobiles would replace cars.

The ideas that emerge as the world evolves and changes will be vastly different and may change the way we live. Now that we are moving more towards a more sustainable way of life through energy and various ways of living, many ideas are emerging. For example, beginning to develop an off-grid style of living that focuses on sustainable energy and producing less waste, which would allow the people of the community to be unaffected by market and energy resource price changes. With off-grid living being a drastic idea that would require a lot of change, a more subtle idea could be to boost the supporting cities to the major cities. So city pairs like Camden to Philadelphia or Chelsea to Boston, where the smaller cities' economies rely on the major city and people commute to work in the major city. A series of smaller changes to the community and having businesses based in the smaller cities, on the other hand, would boost their own economy and allow the city to be more self-sustaining.

These are just a few ideas that could emerge from the next recession, which will be a slow period economically, but there will be a lot of creativity and thinking that comes out of it. I believe that the designers of this era will come up with groundbreaking ideas as they are influenced by understandings of carbon emissions, how the market is influenced by global events, and the systems in society that could be adapted.