If architecture deserves to be celebrated, it must be because, in some way, it represents a human reality of which we can be proud — and at the same time, because it deserves greater recognition and respect. This is similar to celebrating the International Day of Women, Education, Health, or Food. The first Monday of October marks World Architecture Day. For this year, the UIA has proposed the theme “Design for Strength.” Architecture to resist — but resistance to what? Josep María Esquirol reminded us that “to exist is, in part, to resist,” and that the first and most urgent form of resistance must occur within the realm of our own intimacy, against the homogenizing, anesthetizing, and fragmenting forces emanating from economic and political powers interested solely in growing a mass of consumers who act in a homogeneous, instantaneous, and uninterrupted way.
Indeed, a home allows us to resist death. It provides shelter from the harshness of nature, but it also offers a space in which to develop our uniqueness and our richness as singular human beings. Architecture also enables — or should enable — contact with others, the building of community, and the preservation of collective memory. To violate someone’s home is to condemn them to death — to the relentless erosion of time’s forces. It prevents the cultivation of individuality as well as encounters with others. Beyond the home, attacking the representative buildings of a community means erasing its memory — destroying what that community has cared for and built.
Celebrating architecture must remind us — perhaps less that architects give form to spaces, and more that the spaces we inhabit give form to us — and that, therefore, we need spaces that care for us. Spaces that not only protect us from the cold and heat but also from the metaphysical cold — from our temptation to isolate ourselves from the world and from others. Architecture not only protects but also fosters contact. We need an architecture that resists the homogenization of the individual, the erosion of community, social and political dimensions, the arbitrary destruction of collective memory, and the usurpation of such deeply human needs by the whims of the market or political powers.
To achieve this, it is essential to keep alive and active two fundamental qualities of architecture: the ability to provide shelter for the individual, and the ability to connect them with the world and with others.
Lecturer in Architectural Theory at Barcelona School of Architecture (UPC-ETSAB)