From a floating university to a network of black female architects, Phineas Harper offers an alternative guide to the year's most important happenings in architecture.
A barrage of "top 10" articles come out at the end of every year, trumpeting the best films, plays, exhibitions and so on of the previous 12 months. It's a straightforward form of journalism, quick to write and fun to digest, perfect for knackered critics (and their readers) at the end of a long year.
The problem with the conventional top 10 formula is that, within a typical word count, it becomes ultra compressed, with too little space to reflect on a tumultuous year in any depth. Consequently the top 10 trope tends to focus on singular objects or events, like the completion of a building, rather than wider themes. Yet it is within wider themes that the most critical and encouraging stories of the year are buried. Here then, throwing caution (and word counts) to the wind, is my alternative top 10 of architecture in 2018...
Green is the new black
For decades, architecture with an ecological conscience has been variously snubbed as being hippy, nerdy or novelty. Sustainability was seen by architecture as a worthy but tedious technical and legal constraint. Tick-box regulations have been adopted by a compliant but begrudging profession. Sustainable design was necessary but not sexy.
Yet now a growing movement of architects the world over seem to be putting ecology back on the agenda and at the heart ...