The world as we knew it now stands transformed. The pandemic has brought upon us the need to explore new directions in all facets of life. Our freedom to travel, going to work, meeting family and friends, looking for food and water or receiving health assistance are now subject to scrutiny and validation. Everyone is a potential carrier of the virus, and anyone can kill you. The conspiracy of an imminent biological warfare seems more likely the truth and instils fear among us. To be safe, we must be confined. To survive we must scope for safer sanctuaries. The virus? A pretext for transforming the globe into a bleak, pathological, hostile, totalitarian, dystopian nightmare. This is our moment of great disclosure and revelation - the Apocalypse.

 

And what about Architecture? We have discovered that our houses make good jailhouses. We have discovered that infrastructure through which our material needs circulate can be paralyzed with a flick. We have discovered that labor can be extracted through telephone wires as efficiently as it can through sweatshops. We have discovered that the objects that surround us have goblin-eyes and ears that extract our private lives and turn them into raw material for tyrant-monopolists. We have discovered that we are either brains in a vat, or bodies in the workhouse, or cannon-fodder on the ‘frontlines’. The walls that protect us now confine us; the streets that free us now expose us; the amenities that serve us now desert us. The city outside is now a fragment outside our window, a phantom, an idea that we can think about but never wholly experience. It was solid once, it has now melted into air. 

 

And yet, as many have rolled off the cliff, and many are on the edge, the coffers of the masters have never been fuller. Money is growing on trees, and harvested with glee. And yet, we all dread the return to a stifling, alienating ‘normality’. The pandemic scared us. Its disappearance scares us. Our unfreedom, so far concealed, now evident, has been normalized. To return to the pretence of ‘normality’ is now terrifying.

 

There was a time when architects wrote Manifestos. The Bauhaus Manifesto. Towards a New Architecture. The Futurist Manifesto.. and so many more. They were audacious, hubristic, utopian, naive, misguided. But they signalled a shared purpose. They helped us locate ourselves, showed us what to value, and urged us to Act. Deeply polemical about transforming the world around them the ideas in the manifesto sought to find and consolidate a grand narrative for the future, placing the entire act of building as the central piece, where everything, all arts, sciences and commerce came together. 

 

But this avant-garde was defeated. The lofty dreams were relinquished in the face of power, crushed by the dead-weight of the status-quo. The starry-eyed idealists now buried their heads in the sand. “Who are we to change the world? Let us instead become unbridled form-makers, or indulge ourselves while we are here.”

 

But yet again, our predicament demands a shared purpose.

 

The Kamla Raheja Memorial Lecture Series this year calls for a new manifesto - An Apocalypse Manifesto. We invite all critical practitioners of the built environment to think once again about the human condition and the hope of a radical architecture of thought and action - an architecture realistic enough to demand the impossible.